Brando, Marlon

1924–

American Movie Star

A major Hollywood star during the second half of the twentieth century, Marlon Brando has offered American audiences complex models of masculinity that reflect various transformations in American society. His characters have suggested the impact of postwar alienation and changing conceptions of sexuality in America.

Brando's portrayals resonated with broader contemporary cultural messages and debates about masculinity during the 1950s. On the one hand, McCarthyism and Cold War rhetoric demanded adherence to traditional concepts of familial and nationalist virility. But at the same time, new cultural currents generated different understandings of masculine behavior. The Kinsey Report's research on male sexuality (1948) located sexuality at the center of masculine identity; Playboy magazine, first published in 1953, made the distribution of sexually suggestive material more popular and socially acceptable; and the Beat Generation challenged mainstream values by identifying nonconformity, unrestrained sexuality, and homosexuality as acceptable male behaviors. Brando's characters embodied these conflicting understandings of American manliness.

Brando's first role reveals the fragility and vulnerability of postwar masculinity. In the significantly titled The Men (1950), Brando plays a paraplegic war veteran who learns bitter lessons about male identity while readjusting to American society. The lead character's broken body exposes the dependency (on women) lying beneath the contemporary veneer of macho posturing. Similarly, as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Brando's swaggering, loud-mouthed, working-class antihero displays an aggressive masculinity that masks his insecurities. Kowalski's rape of his sister-in-law Blanche represents not so much the triumph of the brute male as an effort to destroy the feminine he fears within himself.

Throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, Brando's roles continued to reflect the insecurities and fears of Cold War society. His characters offered a tough, autonomous, and sometimes (as in 1953's The Wild One) rebellious exterior, while at the same time challenging images of American men as securely patriarchal. They also questioned body-centered ideals of manly toughness through severe beatings—as in On the Waterfront (1954), Brando's self-directed One-Eyed Jacks (1961), and The Chase (1966).

The combination of a macho facade and personal vulnerability appears in his portrayal of the homosexual Major Pendleton in Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). Brando's ambivalence about the relationship between masculinity and homosexuality is suggested by the officer's closeted and obsessive fascination with an army private, as well as his character's misogyny. Despite the film's release date, the depiction owes more to 1950s repressiveness than to the influence of the counterculture of the 1960s.

While Brando's troubled characters confronted the disintegration of “official” masculinity during the 1950s and the further fragmentation of male identity during the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, his major movies of the 1970s closely associated him with patriarchy and aggressiveness. Most notable in this respect are his Oscar-winning portrayal of Don Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), and his fiercely independent military commander Colonel Kurtz in the same director's Apocalypse Now (1979). Yet the self-loathing and sexual disgust memorably encapsulated on screen in Last Tango in Paris (1972) suggest Brando's continuing challenge to self-assured manhood. The spectacular declension of Brando's physique during and after the 1970s—the subject of considerable public notice and comment—may be read as a potent symbol of Brando's persistent ambivalence about the meaning of American masculinity.

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