One day when he was 17, Marlon Brando took a bottle of hair tonic to
school. When nobody was looking, he dribbled a thin stream of the stuff
down a corridor, into an empty study room, and up the front wall. On
the wall he scrawled, with the almost invisible liquid, a shocking
word. Next period, when the room was full, he set a match to the hair
tonic. Blue flame whooshed through the room, and the handwriting on the
wall that day was nothing short of illuminating. A little more than a decade later, Bad Boy Brando, still something of a
showoff, has pulled the trick again. But this time his wall is a
hundred thousand movie screens, his performance is distinctly more
artistic, and his audience is the popeyed world. Six pictures in four
years—The Men, A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata!, Julius Caesar,
The Wild One, On the Waterfront—have branded the Brando name and face
blue-hot on the public mind. In a business where money talks, Brando is now being hailed as “a real
drag-'em-in big-tenner like nobody since Clark Gable.” And his pictures
have won loud, critical huzzahs as well as some stentorian box-office
grosses. Last week Brando completed a seventh, Dsire, a film version
of Annemarie Selinko's 1953 bestselling novel, in which he plays
Napoleon. Twentieth Century-Fox boldly predicts that it may take in up
to $10 million. “Two more like Brando,” said one producer, “and
television can crawl back in the tube.” Byron from Brooklyn. One like Brando, as a matter of fact, is more than
Hollywood has been able to handle, or even figure out. The big studios,
which are capable of taking endless pains to exploit either a valuable
property or an eccentric personality, have not yet been able to answer
the basic question: What is Brando, and what does he have that the U.S.
public seems to want more of? It could hardly be conventional good looks. Brando has a nose that drips
down his face, according to a make-up man, “like melted ice cream” . But then
again, as one fan tried to explain, he does have a kind of “lyric
lunkishness—he looks like a Lord Byron from Brooklyn.” Is sex appeal
his secret? No doubt about it, said one producer: “He's a walking
hormone factory.” An exhibitor, musing about his own business, said:
“He's everybody between 10 and 20 that comes into my theater, and
they're really coming to see themselves. He's the Valentino of the bop
generation, and he's bringing the kids back to the movies.”
