Mrlon Brando’s autobiography re-edited 100 years after his birth

Stella Adler, a teacher at the famous Actors Studio in New York, orders her students during a lesson to behave “like chickens while a nuclear bomb is about to crash”. Marlon Brando remains motionless. “I’m a chicken, what do I know about bombs?” – photo

There was a before and an after Brando. The first, with set actors, perfect diction, rhetorical emphasis. The next one is called Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Daniel Day Lewis. Total identification with the character, naturalness, wonderful fiction that seems truer than reality.

NEVER SAY WORDS AGAINST ANYONE – Without Brando, born in Omaha, Nebraska, one hundred years ago and passed away in 2004 at the age of 80, perhaps today’s cinema would not exist. Wonderful creature when young, capable of making women, men and even the asphalt of New York sidewalks fall in love, worn out by life as an old man, when disappointments, heavy mourning and bruises on the heart become an unbearable burden. «Yet one fact amazes and moves you when you read about his life: you won’t find a single malicious word towards anyone», says Giulio Base, actor and director, new director of the Torino FilmFestival (from 22nd to 30th November), who wrote the introduction to Brando’s autobiography, The songs my mother taught me, re-edited by La Nave di Teseo on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. «For example, he had clashed a lot with Bernardo Bertolucci, when he had acted in “scandalous” Last tango in Paris. He said that the Italian director had used some of his confidences relating to his years of psychoanalysis to design the protagonist of the film, neurotic and unresolved. With Gillo Pontecorvo, during the making of Queimada, even came to blows, so much so that the director started filming with a gun in his pocket, to avoid further trouble. Yet, when they asked him who were the directors with whom he had made the best films, Brando naturally cited Elia Kazan of Harbor front and of A tram called desirebut then Bertolucci and Pontecorvo themselves.”

Do you agree with him? «Well, it’s hard not to also think of the ones filmed with Francis Ford Coppola: Apocalypse Now and The Godfather».

The cotton wool between the cheeks to slur like a real Italian American mafioso was Brando’s idea. The death in the home garden, while he plays with his grandson, rather than killed by his rivals in a firefight, is unforgettable. «Well, Marlon was unique there, in a scene like that you can perceive his incredible talent. As an actor, and I say this with total reverence, I know that the most difficult things are acting with animals and children, because they have a natural magnetism that captures the viewer’s attention. In The Godfather, Brando begins with a cat on his lap and ends with a baby.”

But what is his best interpretation? «He had an incredible search for perfection, think that even Stanley Kowalski of A tram called desire, which we all rightly consider fantastic, did not satisfy him. In this sense, Brando was like Michelangelo, who after having finished sculpting a marvel like Moses, says to him: “Why don’t you speak?”. But above all I love a lesser-known film, Reflections in a golden eye (by John Huston, ed.), in which Marlon apparently does very little. He plays an army major, homosexual. This film will be presented in Turin as part of the Lovers festival, directed by Vladimir Luxuria, which will anticipate mine, in which I dedicate a retrospective to Brando, with all of his films.”

Welcome to The Brando: the super luxury resort on the island that Marlon Brando bought in 1967 is finally open – Look

Brando made no secret of his bisexuality. «Yes, he spoke about it with absolute naturalness. He was an incredibly modern man in his way of behaving. He was an environmentalist ante litteram when he went to live in Tetiaroa, a small island in Polynesia, and was committed to respecting nature. Sensitive towards minorities, just think that he sent a Native American to collect his Oscar statuette for The Godfather».

In his autobiography, Brando, who loved beauties such as Marilyn Monroe, Anita Ekberg, Ava Gardner, reveals who was the woman of his life? Maybe the mother of the title? «It will seem incredible: his babysitter, an Indonesian girl. Perhaps also for this reason she searched for “exotic” girls all her life, not the classic wasps, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant.
Marlon’s parents were alcoholics, his father left home at a certain point and it happened that he and his sisters found themselves having to look for their mother around the neighborhood bars. The babysitter, whose silky hair he remembers, the warm breast on which he curled up, instead made him feel cared for.”

In addition to the cinematic Brando, we also all remember the man at the trial of his eldest son Christian (later sentenced to 10 years for premeditated murder, ed.), who had killed his sister Cheyenne’s boyfriend. “He said, ‘As a father, I have failed,’ and he cried. I was always left wondering: would he have been sincere? Or was that testimony another of his immense acting performances? Of one thing, however, I am certain: it was a great act of love.”

Giovanna Fumarola