I remember Brando

Of all the many, many tributes that have come over the pike about the late actor, perhaps this weekend’s essay in the Glasgow Herald by Budd Schulberg, the famed author of one of the best and most acidic satirical novels, WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN? as well as the screenwriter for ON THE WATERFRONT, is my favorite:

Once, when Marlon accepted still another inconsequential role in some forgettable film, I wrote him a letter saying no money could have bought me to write those silly films. Next time I ran into him at a party (he was not yet the recluse he was to become), he said “Budd, I got your letter and it gave me nightmares.” “Christ, Marlon, I don’t want to give you nightmares, but you’re so damned unique, I can’t think of anyone else who’s got what you’ve got and feel so strongly about things. If you could just get the two sides together.”

When I got the call from the Glasgow Herald and heard for the first time that Marlon was gone, I remembered that conversation, and it summed up for me the odd dichotomy that was Marlon Brando.

But even with that failure of connection, there goes the greatest film actor ever born and developed in the United States. In Streetcar, The Waterfront, Last Tango in Paris, The Godfather, he established a new way of being in film. How odd it was and in some ways so sad, that the greatest motion picture actor who ever lived thought of acting as somehow demeaning. Something he simply had to do from time to time to make a dollar. I always wondered whether, in his lines, he wasn’t the quintessential underdog.

I never would have thought Schulberg would outlive Brando, but there you have it.

Otherwise, I don’t have anything much further to add than what I’d emailed Terry Friday afternoon except for pointing you to Jaime’s rather balanced view of Brando’s career.