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The new sensitivity
MARLON BRANDO
The first movie Marlon Brando made was The Men, in 1950. Cast as an embittered paraplegic, he endured a month in a hospital ward with men who really had been paralyzed as a result of war wounds. With his usual intensity, Brando experienced the paraplegic's bedridden existence, practiced his exercises, learned to manipulate a wheel chair. Then, one Saturday, he went with some of his ward mates to a beer joint to which they frequently repaired. There they were set upon by a religious fanatic who told them that if they would but have faith they might rise up and walk again. On and on he droned, until Brando cried, "You really mean I can walk if I want to enough?" Not waiting for a reply, he leaped from his chair and dashed from the bar, returning quickly with a bundle of newspapers which he proceeded to hawk up and down the bar, yelling joyously, "Now I can make a living again." The men in the wheel chairs roared with laughter, and if there had been any strain between them and the actors who were suddenly living among them for purposes of the picture, it was ended.
The story is not set down here as an idle anecdote, for it tells a great deal about Marlon Brando — his impatience with the fraudulent, and the open rebellion it causes in him; his uncanny sense of what is natural, what is "right" in the actor's imitation of human behavior; and, perhaps most important of all, his sense of exactly what an audience will accept. One may set aside the fact that his performance in the bar served a good end, the freeing of brave men from tedium, false pity and offensiveness. But it is hard to set aside the fact that Brando's response was very much in the vein of his time, a time which has found Holden Caulfield to be a true hero, a hero whose chief claim upon us is his withering contempt for the phony.
Brando is not liked by the older generation, generally speaking. They accuse him of mumbling and scratching, of an unwonted sullenness, of seeming to brood too much and, when not so occupied, of being too violent, too antisocial. All of this, in a way, is true, and in the noisy campaign he has conducted against the poseurs of Hollywood it may be that he has created a pose as phony as any he is reacting against. But its roots lie in an honest reaction. "In my own
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