Brando made his first trip to the Coast in 1949, when he went out there to play the leading role in The Men, a picture dealing with paraplegic war veterans. He was accused, at the time, of uncouth social conduct, and criticized for his black-leather-jacket taste in attire, his choice of motorcycles instead of Jaguars and his preference for obscure secretaries rather than movie starlets; moreover, Hollywood columnists studded their copy with hostile comments concerning his attitude toward the film business, which he himself summed up soon after he entered it by saying, “The only reason I’m here is that I don’t yet have the moral courage to turn down the money.” In interviews, he repeatedly stated that becoming “simply a movie actor” was the thing furthest from his thoughts.
“I may do a picture now and then,” he said on one occasion, “but mostly I intend to work on the stage.” However, he followed The Men, which was more of a succès d’estime than a commercial triumph, by re-creating Kowalski in the screen treatment of A Streetcar Named Desire, and this role, as it had done on Broadway, established him as a star. (Defined practically, a movie star is any performer who can account for a box-office profit regardless of the quality of the enterprise in which he appears; the breed is so scarce that there are fewer than ten actors today who qualify for the title. Brando is one of them; as a box-office draw, male division, he is perhaps outranked only by William Holden.)
In the course of the last five years he has played a Mexican revolutionary (Viva Zapata!), Mark Antony (Julius Caesar) and a motorcycle-mad juvenile delinquent (The Wild One); earned an Academy Award in the role of a dockyard thug (On the Waterfront); impersonated Napoleon (Désirée); sung and danced his way through the part of an adult delinquent (Guys and Dolls); and taken the part of the Okinawan interpreter in The Teahouse of the August Moon, which, like Sayonara, his tenth picture, was partly shot on location in Japan.
But he has never, except for a brief period in summer stock, returned to the stage. “Why should I?” he asked with apathy when I remarked on this. “The movies have a greater potential. They can be a factor for good. For moral development. At least some can—the kind of movies I want to do.” He paused, seemed to listen, as though his statement had been tape-recorded and he were now playing it back.
Possibly the sound of it dissatisfied him; at any rate, his jaw started working, as if he were biting down on an unpleasant mouthful. He looked off into space suddenly and demanded, “What’s so hot about New York? What’s so hot about working for Cheryl Crawford and Robert Whitehead?” Miss Crawford and Whitehead are two of New York’s most prominent theatrical producers, neither of whom has had occasion to employ Brando. “Anyway, what would I be in?” he continued. “There aren’t any parts for me.”
Stack them, and the playscripts offered him in any given season by hopeful Broadway managements might very well rise to a height exceeding the actor’s own. Tennessee Williams wanted him for the male lead in each of his last five plays, and the most recent of these, Orpheus Descending, which was pending production at the time of our talk, had been written expressly as a co-starring vehicle for Brando and the Italian actress Anna Magnani.
“I can explain very easily why I didn’t do Orpheus,” Brando said. “There are beautiful things in it, some of Tennessee’s best writing, and the Magnani part is great; she stands for something, you can understand her—and she would wipe me off the stage. The character I was supposed to play, this boy, this Val, he never takes a stand. I didn’t really know what he was for or against.
Well, you can’t act a vacuum. And I told Tennessee. So he kept trying. He rewrote it for me, maybe a couple of times. But—” He shrugged. “Well, I had no intention of walking out on any stage with Magnani. Not in that part. They’d have had to mop me up.”
Brando mused a moment, and added, “I think—in fact, I’m sure—Tennessee has made a fixed association between me and Kowalski. I mean, we’re friends and he knows that as a person I am just the opposite of Kowalski, who was everything I’m against—totally insensitive, crude, cruel. But still, Tennessee’s image of me is confused with the fact that I played that part. So I don’t know if he could write for me in a different color range. The only reason I did Guys and Dolls was to work in a lighter color—yellow.
Before that, the brightest color I’d played was red. From red down. Brown. Gray. Black.” He crumpled an empty cigarette package and bounced it in his hand like a ball. “There aren’t any parts for me on the stage. Nobody writes them. Go on. Tell me a part I could do.”
In the absence of vehicles by worthy contemporaries, might he not favor the work of older hands? Several responsible persons who appeared with him in the film had admired his reading of Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, and thought him equipped, provided the will was there, to essay many of the Mount Everest roles in stage literature—even, possibly, Oedipus.
Brando received reminders of this praise blankly—or, rather, he seemed to be indulging his not-listening habit. But sensing silence again, he dissolved it: “Of course, movies date so quickly. I saw Streetcar the other day and it was already an old-fashioned picture. Still, movies do have the greatest potential. You can say important things to a lot of people. About discrimination and hatred and prejudice.
I want to make pictures that explore the themes current in the world today. In terms of entertainment. That’s why I’ve started my own independent production company.” He reached out affectionately to finger A Burst of Vermilion, which will be the first script filmed by Pennebaker Productions—the independent company he has formed.
And did A Burst of Vermilion satisfy him as a basis for the kind of lofty aims he proposed?
He mumbled something. Then he mumbled something else. Asked to speak more clearly, he said, “It’s a Western.”
He was unable to restrain a smile, which expanded into laughter. He rolled on the floor and roared. “Christ, the only thing is, will I ever be able to look my friends in the face again?” Sobering somewhat, he said, “Seriously, though, the first picture has to make money. Otherwise, there won’t be another. I’m nearly broke. No, no kidding. I spent a year and two hundred thousand dollars of my own money trying to get some writer to come up with a decent script. Which used my ideas. The last one, it was so terrible I said I can do better myself. I’m going to direct it, too.”
Produced by, directed by, written by, and starring. Charlie Chaplin has managed this, and gone it one better by composing his own scores. But professionals of wide experience—Orson Welles, for one—have caved in under a lesser number of chores than Brando planned to assume. However, he had a ready answer to my suggestion that he might be loading the cart with more than the donkey could haul. “Take producing,” he said.
“What does a producer do except cast? I know as much about casting as anyone does, and that’s all producing is. Casting.” In the trade, one would be hard put to it to find anyone who concurred in this opinion. A good producer, in addition to doing the casting—that is, assembling the writer, the director, the actors, the technical crew and the other components of his team—must be a diplomat of the emotions, smoothing and soothing, and above all, must be a skilled mechanic when it comes to dollars-and-cents machinery. “But seriously,” said Brando, now excessively sober, “Burst isn’t just cowboys-and-Indians stuff. It’s about this Mexican boy—hatred and discrimination. What happens to a community when those things exist.”
Sayonara, too, has moments when it purports to attack race prejudice, telling, as it does, the tale of an American jet pilot who falls in love with a Japanese music-hall dancer, much to the dismay of his Air Force superiors, and also to the dismay of her employers, though the latter’s objection is not the racial unsuitability of her beau but simply that she has a beau at all, for she is a member of an all-girl opera company—based on a real-life counterpart, the Takarazuka Company—whose management promotes a legend that offstage its hundreds of girls lead a conventlike existence, unsullied by male presence of any creed or color.
Michener’s novel concludes with the lovers forlornly bidding each other sayonara, a word meaning farewell. In the film version, however, the word, and consequently the title, has lost significance; here the fadeout reveals the twain of East and West so closely met that they are on their way to the matrimonial bureau.
At a press conference that Brando conducted upon his Tokyo arrival, he informed some sixty reporters that he had contracted to do this story because “it strikes very precisely at prejudices that serve to limit our progress toward a peaceful world. Underneath the romance, it attacks prejudices that exist on the part of the Japanese as well as on our part,” and also he was doing the film because it would give him the “invaluable opportunity” of working under Joshua
