On the Brando Front

Afamous posed photograph from the 1950s shows Bob Hope and Marlon Brando fighting over an Oscar statuette.

What makes the picture especially funny is that Brando, the man who taught America how to mumble and glower, is doing most of the mugging.

Clark Gable taught American men how to dress without an undershirt in "It Happened One Night." Brando taught them how to wear nothing but a T-shirt - and a torn one at that — in "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951). Men may wanted to be Gable or John Wayne or Gary Cooper before, but after "Streetcar," all any of them wanted was to be Brando.

Few people would have imagined back then that in his final decades, Marlon Brando - the brooding, sullen, introspective actor who redefined male sexual presence in "Streetcar" and such subsequent films as "On the Waterfront," "One-Eyed Jacks," "Viva Zapata!" and "The Fugitive Kind," would be mugging his way through a succession of oddball film roles on his tippytoes — like a dancing hippo from "Fantasia."

The beginning of this run of Brando lite, which adds the heist film "The Score" on Friday, can be dated back at least as far as Arthur Penn's 1976 "The Missouri Breaks," in which Brando played a hired killer in the Old West, tracking Jack Nicholson. Despite the seriousness of the part, Brando played Robert E. Lee Clayton as a thorough eccentric given to disguises - including that of a bonnet-topped frontier woman.

In "Superman" (1978), Brando played Jor-El, the Man of Steel's scientist father on the planet Krypton. Brando, with a silver spit curl and wearing a reflective silver suit, delicately walked about as though he were modeling Liberace loungewear, speaking in a minced, supercilious British accent that he might have lifted from Claude Rains.

He followed that with "Apocalypse Now" (1979), reuniting with Francis Ford Coppola, his director seven years earlier on "The Godfather." In "Apocalypse," Brando was Col. Kurtz, a renegade, possibly mad supersoldier holed up in a cave in Cambodia, appearing mostly in the shadows as he mutters about the nature of horror.

From that point on, Brando went broader and weirder, playing a kind of South African Charles Laughton in "A Dry White Season" (1989), a parody of his Don Corleone in "The Freshman" (1990), the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada in "Christopher Columbus: The Discovery" (1992) and a wonderfully good-natured psychiatrist in "Don Juan DeMarco" (1995), opposite Johnny Depp.

After that, he played an absurdly dotty scientist in "The Island of Dr. Moreau" (1996), acting as though he had stumbled into a dinner theater version of "The Night of the Iguana" on his way to a remake of "The Bank Dick."

In 1998, Brando played "The Swede" in a film called "Free Money." Big as a house, bald and wearing a mustache, he chased after Charlie Sheen with a cattle prod and pounded Mira Sorvino on the head with a shoe. He was obviously delighted with himself.

A Light Touch

Now, in "The Score," Brando is Max, a dealer in stolen goods who teams up with a retired crook and a young hotshot for the proverbial last big score. His co-stars are Robert De Niro and Edward Norton, two actors who'd be among the first to admit the Brando influence. The picture is a tight, intense caper movie that wouldn't seem to allow much room for levity. Yet, Brando lightens nearly every scene he's in, however brief.

Says producer Gary Foster: "He's a child. He loves to have fun. He's a practical joker who's never lost that childlike quality. We never thought people would laugh, but they laugh because they're enjoying his fun. He's so charming."

The question remains: What happened to Brando in the mid-'70s to cause him to abandon the self-serious aspect of his acting?

"I think with 'Last Tango in Paris' (1973), he emotionally drained himself," says Frank Oz, who directed "The Score."

"It took a lot out of him and he might have said, 'I don't ever want to be this naked again.'"

It's certainly true that Brando's performance in Bernardo Bertolucci's film blurred the lines separating autobiography, acting and sheer, staggering soul-purging.

"He laid it out there," says Edward Norton, "his own hypocrisy, the side of himself that is vainglorious and the side of himself that hates the vaingloriousness. He stripped the last vestiges of facade or pretense or defensiveness or of self-consciousness, and he really put himself up there as naked and self-loathing and self-critical and self-exposed as you'll ever see.

"And I think he knew what he was doing when he did it, and he was done after that. He knew he had taken it about as far as he could, and he hung it up for love."

And yet, according to Bertolucci, "I finally met with Brando again, 20 years later. We talked all afternoon until it was dark, and I said to Marlon, 'I was very proud to have brought the real Marlon Brando in my movie - not the Method actor, the star, but the man,' and Marlon turns and he says to me, 'What makes you think that was me?'"

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