Marlon sometimes on brand

Fascinating biography about actor is a little messy — just like his career

The Contender:

The Story of Marlon Brando William J. Mann

Harper

Everybody in my old Bronx neighbourhood was excited.

They were shooting a scene for The Godfather in the local Italian restaurant, and Marlon Brando would be there. Then, big letdown: only Sterling Hayden and some young punk named Al Pacino.

Brando hadn’t been in a notable movie in nearly a decade. He’d appeared in movies that made money and others that bombed, but none like those three early standouts: A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Julius Caesar (1953) and On the Waterfront (1954). Those made him one of the most acclaimed — and bankable — actors in Hollywood, and garnered Oscar nominations and his first win, for Waterfront (“I coulda been a contender ...”).

Almost 20 years and numerous flops later, the locals were still excited.

William J. Mann’s The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando is a big, sprawling, meticulously researched and, for the most part, compelling biography that tells us everything we ever wanted to know about the man and then some. Brando lived a messy life, so maybe it’s appropriate that his biography is somewhat messy, too, with its not-quite-chronological arrangement.

Both of Brando’s parents were alcoholics, Dad abused Mom, and young Marlon had to rescue her more than once from drunken escapades beyond the family’s property lines.

Not the happiest childhood, and when he grew up, he forswore alcohol like it was, well, monogamy.

A prep school teacher recognized his acting talent, and Brando moved soon after to

New York, where he impressed theatre people, among them the great teacher Stella Adler of the Dramatic Workshop.

Mann ably captures Brando’s blossoming in New York’s theatre world. When he acted in a play at the New School, his classmate Mae Cooper recalled, it “gave you the chills.” Others, including actress Jessica Tandy, thought him a “psychopathic bastard.”

Another central person was director Elia Kazan, who worked with Brando first on stage and then on two of his best early movies, Streetcar and Waterfront.

After those early successes, though, Brando started making movies more for the money than the quality. Some became hits, but by the 1960s most were not.

By the early ’70s Brando was pretty much washed up in Hollywood. But young Francis Ford Coppola thought he’d be perfect as Vito Corleone in The Godfather. He got along with Coppola. Mann says it was his happiest collaboration since Kazan nearly 20 years earlier. The movie, released in 1972, reignited his career and won him his second Oscar. But after its success and the succès de scandale of Last Tango in Paris, released in the U.S. in 1973, Brando went back to working for cash.

In the prologue, Mann makes the questionable assertion that “Brando’s acting, as great and as important as it is, is not the most interesting thing about him.” But our interest in him springs from his best acting — not from his political activism, his frequent affairs, his numerous wives, his many children or the attempted suicides of several people around him. That’s all grist for a bio, but it’s not the main attraction.

A footnote: With the success of The Godfather, that Bronx Italian restaurant, Louie’s, should have become a tourist destination. Alas, it closed before the movie opened. Word on the street was that the owner got in over his head to a local loan shark and fled town. Too bad. The owner had a good thing and didn’t know it.

The Washington Post