The Young Lions, 1958
I have had a chance to watch Brando’s career from its beginning because he made his professional debut in a children’s play of mine at the Adelphi Theater in New York in 1944. His role consisted of being hit on the head and falling down; but he managed to find a way of falling down that, without being obtrusive, was individual.
Brando has evolved a personal style which relies largely on understatement and the liberal use of pauses. Often the effect is heart-breaking; remember the poignancy he gave the vapid monosyllable “Wow” in On the Waterfront when he learned that his brother was threatening his life. Occasionally the style lapses out of meaning into mannerism; some of Sayonara could have used compression. But in essence he reflects in his style—as actors often do—a prevalent artistic vein of his day. Kemble exemplified the classic, elegant eighteenth century, Kean the wild, torrential romantics of the early nineteenth century, Irving the elaborate majesty of the late Victorians. I compare Brando with these luminaries only to draw a parallel. He is a taciturn realist: an epitome not of that joyous realistic revolution which swept away the humbug that obscured the contours of the world but of that generation born into realism which has seen its world with harsh clarity, whose work is to reconcile itself to that world’s revealed boundaries and to find its triumphs inwardly.
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