What makes marlon brando so good

A big, rough-but-lovable movie star - audiences love him - who, regardless of the movie's story, period, setting or auspices, can be counted on to deliver the same superb rendition of his rough-but-lovable self inasmuch as he is his whole repertoire, says Brando's tremendous, electrifying, a killer, and he'll punch anybody in the nose who says different.

Only trouble with Brando, he says, is he's always playing Brando. A long-time producer, who, from seeing so many actors come and go, keeps a level head about them, says watching Brando in a movie becomes an experience so intimate, it almost makes him feel like a peeping Tom - as if he were on the Twentieth Century coming into New York in the summertime when all those tenement windows are open and you see real people really living, not acting like people really living.

Looking at Brando in a movie, the screen vanishes, Brando vanishes, acting vanishes; and there's nothing left between you and the naked truth. Brando himself says, at first, in the sing-song intonation of a schoolboy reciting by rote, the things experience has taught him he's expected to say. But because he belongs to the sect of actors which believes that constant practice of a character's particular physical attributes helps the character take full possession of the actor he says them with voice low and authoritative, diction delicate and precise, inflection a bit strange, doubtless French.

He supposes one must realize that big studios are run by their front offices, and front offices must turn out product; product's what they call it; still, finding oneself enmeshed in product's no excuse not to try to do one's best, etc. Or, the difference between acting for the stage and the movies is etc.

But what he's saying doesn't interest Brando either; he seems more interested in what he's thinking. However, because his courtesy and good manners are an integral part of him and he can no more turn them off than he can turn them on, he brings most of himself to attention and in quest of some common ground, he begins to ask questions, direct impersonal questions of fact and ideas, listening gravely to the answers as if at last he's learned something he's always wanted to know.

The legend says he has no social graces and no small talk and now, deliberately or not, he's laid that one to rest. The scene is Brando's small rented house set close to the road in a fold of Beverly Hills that out here they call a canyon. The zoom of a vacuum cleaner zings through the open windows. A reporter asked to lunch stands at the door, clanging the ship's bell above it. The ship's bell wins. A maid opens the door, bids the reporter come in, shows her into the living room and resumes her vacuum cleaning there.

A cold buffet lunch - melon, cold meats, sandwiches, mixed green salad - is already laid out on the large coffee table in front of the sofa. The reporter notes: keeps a clean house; is well organized; sets an informal but good table - as she sinks back on the sofa and closes her eyes.

A half-hour earlier she'd staggered away from an ''On the Waterfront'' screening and that poor battered boy with the bloody head and pain-dulled eyes, only to walk into his parlor. The absence of sound rouses her.

He is waiting to shake hands, immaculate in pale blue denim pants and white Basque shirt with blue stripes that mark the exceptional breadth of his shoulders. He stands easy and relaxed; he does not writhe like Ralph Meeker. He is taller than he seems on the screen; he is miraculously recovered; his swollen face has gone back to its original contours, which are more like Mark Antony's than Stanley Kowalski's, but finer, their astonishing delicacy and sensitivity at odds with his strong athlete's torso.

He counters her offer of a good-for-you atomic-bomb-filter cigarette with his presentation of a better-for-you H-bomb-filter cigarette, lights hers, takes none himself, explains he'd stopped smoking five months ago because suddenly he could no longer endure slavery to those useless, filthy, miserable, vicious little beasts.

In the moment he takes to tell it, the intensity of his loathing has conjured the little objects into a pack of hissing serpents, but as swiftly they are cigarettes again, for he's forgotten them, asking the reporter if she'd like a drink. She suggests a martini; he asks how you make them; the maid says you need gin but they haven't got any; they have some vodka; a little vodka in orange juice makes a nice drink; which indeed it does, for the reporter only. Note: he has scant regard for liquor.

Some friends wander in, are introduced, join in the talk that interests them, wander off. Note: his friends feel at home in his house. He is in the midst of a sentence when suddenly something about the arm of the reporter's chair transfixes him.

He stops, leans forward, pulls back into place an upholstered chair cuff that was about to slip off, smoothes it exactly right, then returns to his oral revelations. Note: he is neat; considerate of other people's property. The phonograph playing symphonies is muted; it is peaceful and pleasant in the room. Born in , she also has a brother, Miko Castaneda Brando, five years her senior. In the end he only made money so he could help fight injustices. There was a huge fuss about it, but I knew why he did it — if they were going to pay it then why not?

He just put his money into the things he really cared about. Rebecca realises that her father made these tapes because, as much as anything, he wanted to clarify his thoughts. They became a journal that helped him iron out the jumble of ideas and theories. There is much that Riley had to leave out of the film. The conversations Brando had for hours on end with influential friends, such as Nick Nolte or Jack Nicholson, a man who became his confidante and neighbour.

Riley remembers listening to one particular tape and thought he was hearing Brando chatting up a woman.

Only after some time did the director realise the woman was actually the high-pitched Michael Jackson. I ask Rebecca whether her father ever divulged how he really felt about his most famous roles.

He wanted us to follow our academic pursuits. Can you sing it for me? This he got from his own father. It feels like I intimidate people. As a young woman growing up, Rebecca would have to steel herself to introduce a new boyfriend to her father. Brando died on 1 July from respiratory and heart difficulties.

He left behind 14 children and at least 30 grandchildren. Towards the end of his life he suffered from failing eyesight, caused by diabetes, and also liver cancer. It was his voice, eerily enough, that remained. He recorded a line for a computer game as Vito Corleone shortly before he died, and he made a point of phoning loved ones, family and friends in the weeks preceding his death.

We expressed our love for one another and that was it. I will never forget it. He also loved technology. He loved the internet and wanted to make television shows that were web only — that was a long time before Netflix. He would be pleased to see the electric car, things like the Prius, taking off. He liked reality television. I think he was aware of the Kardashians. He would have loved the iPhone and iPad; he worked with Photoshop a lot.

He would have got a kick out of all those creative apps; the ones that distort your face There was one piece of technology that Brando wanted more than any other. What does Rebecca think her father would have made of the documentary? He knew those tapes would be found and used in some way — he was no dummy. I feel this was his document, his diary unlocked for us to -discover.

The wry and wounded Jason Segel is only thirty-five; the bluff and playful Jake Johnson is under forty. On the other hand, things have changed—not in the movies but in the world—that affect the tone and texture of acting, more for men than for women: the fundamental shift, in the post-sixties era , from a rush into adulthood to a prolongation of youth.

The difference is more psychological than practical. Yet it affects actors especially : few can summon the granitic opacity of people from half a century ago or far earlier, yet British actors can imitate it.

Critics who look to the wrong films as exemplary will miss a rising star; those who fixate on studio films will wonder where the next generation of actors is coming from; those who overlook the best young directors will overlook the best young actors. By Richard Brody. Great independent filmmakers and actors on display at BAM. Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in He writes about movies in his blog, The Front Row. More: Acting independent cinema Marlon Brando Movies.

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