THE CONTENDER

THE STORY OF MARLON BRANDO

WILLIAM J MANN

Harpercollins, 718pp, £22

‘Very few great actors made so many inconsequential films – or found themselves in so many implausible and ugly situations,’ declared the distinguished film critic David Thomson in the London Review of

Books. Compared to Peter Manso’s 1994 biography, which was based on 750 interviews and ran to 1,118 pages, as Thomson pointed out, Mann’s ‘modest work (718 pages) draws on fewer interviews, not that it lacks flavour or credibility when it comes to what friends, lovers, colleagues and onlookers remember’. Thomson liked the way the book moves ‘back and forth in time, dumping strict chronology for feeling and insight’. For example, Mann uses two incidents several years apart ‘to explore Brando’s unceasing sexual adventurism, and his habit of seeking parental figures and then abandoning them. There was a natural promiscuity to him, like an actor who wondered if he might play all the roles. That takes us into the heart of things: why he acted, whom he sought to please, and how his prowess clashed with his manicdepressive roundabout.’

Roger Lewis, in the Daily Mail,

was having none of this. ‘This is one of those psychologically claustrophobic biographies where each and every instance of adult behaviour, the obstinacies and vituperation, is immediately traced back to childhood trauma, which axiomatically include bad parenting, hopeless schooling (undiagnosed dyslexia – of course) and an injured knee.’ Not an admirer of Brando as an actor (‘his apparent realism was seldom realistic...there was a lot of artifice and stylisation’), he found Mann’s book exasperating: ‘Why are movie biographies often so dire? This zigzag opus is hard to follow. Some films are dealt with in obsessive detail, others go unmentioned – there is hardly anything on Apocalypse Now. Mann’s chronology is confused to such an extent that I wondered whether a compositor had randomly shuffled the manuscript pages in a fit.’