Make way for Marlon Brando, Laurence Olivier and David Thomson. Other great actors are mentioned in David Thomson’s new book, but surprisingly few. Mainly the text is confined to memorialising these three. And if you doubt that David Thomson counts as a great actor, consider that he has built a reputation for being profound out of a whole lifetime of doing almost nothing except watching movies. You and I did the same, but we get called frivolous. David Thomson gets revered. It’s a tribute to his serious face, transported carefully to centre stage and looking all of us in the eye, daring us to call him crazy for being eager to discuss the divine stature of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, a movie, which, he says, he has seen “five or six times.” What was he hoping to find, Richard Gere’s eyes?
His old head at least as full of screen performances as mine, Thomson strangely chooses, for the focus of his new short treatise, a skimpy handful of stage performances dating from his very early years. Some of them he actually saw, but only a few. Out there in Australia, I heard about Brando’s performance as Stanley Kowalski in Elia Kazan’s Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire, but couldn’t see it. Thomson, about six years old at the time, couldn’t have seen it either. He did see Olivier on stage as Shakespeare’s Othello—I saw that too, the year I got to England—and earlier he had seen Olivier as Archie Rice in the Royal Court production of John Osborne’s The Entertainer. Even though Thomson was only 15, it must have been a formative experience, with every detail of Olivier’s sweat-wet make-up clear to the future critic’s piercing scrutiny.
But he never saw Brando on stage in Streetcar: if he had, half the book would have no other subject. He saw Brando’s Stanley the way I did: in the movie. He must therefore have shared my general impression of a classically good-looking young man eating the script and eructating it back to the atmosphere in a series of slurred burps and aphasic grunts. According to Thomson, though, Brando was a revolution. That’s the way the book is organised, in fact: Olivier is the last of the ancien régime and Brando is the whole of the revolution including Napoleon.
My apologies for even momentarily conjuring up Brando’s screen performance as Napoleon in Désirée, a miasma of portentous brooding which Thomson prefers to think was an act of sabotage on Brando’s part instead of just his usual digestive attack on the written script. I admire Brando too, but only for those moments on screen—they amount to the length of about two and a half movies in all—when he showed some respect for the group enterprise in which he was engaged.
Unequivocal admirers of Brando often excuse his habit of sabotaging his own starring vehicles on the grounds that he was so serious about his craft he couldn’t bear a context that was not true to life. There is something in that idea, but not much. He did, after all, walk away from the editing of One-Eyed Jacks, a movie he not only starred in, but directed. In other words, after half a career of bitching about lack of control, when he got control he didn’t know what to do with it. Cope with the irrationality of that, and you are ready to cope with his apparently wilful, indeed suicidal, determination to add an extra dimension to his role as Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty. The dimension he added was histrionics. Any of our modern-day male screen stars who pad out a role by peppering each speech with pauses and looking sideways in six different directions is being histrionic in a way that Brando invented. My friend Antonia Quirke argues that James Stewart pioneered the screen mumble but Stewart’s use of the device had only limited scope, because eventually the written lines got through uninjured. In his speeches, Brando could make even the visuals mumble. It was a kind of achievement, but a dubious one for him and a disaster for all those younger actors who copied him, and therefore a continuing disaster for all of us.
In the movie Species Ben Kingsley and Michael Madsen staged a competition for who could look sideways more often. Madsen won it by actually turning his back on the camera to look out of a window that wasn’t there. Should you see Species again, if only to check up on whether Natasha Henstridge could really be that beautiful while harbouring within her skin a gigantic multi-branched mucoid alien, check out the way that Kingsley, while talking, and even more when someone else is talking, looks to every part of the screen as if his feet were shackled to the floor in the middle of an art gallery. That he didn’t do the same when starring as Mahatma Gandhi is a tribute to the late Richard Attenborough’s powers as a disciplinarian. As he sat in his director’s chair, Attenborough must have been nursing a large gun. Otherwise Kingsley, while pronouncing on the virtues of passive resistance, would have been busy verifying optically the existence of India.
The accumulated insanity of Brando’s heritage through the generations should be kept in mind when we assess his brilliance in Julius Caesar, On the Waterfront, Guys and Dolls and The Godfather. In all four cases (we could make it five if time had not so cruelly overtaken Last Tango in Paris by making on-screen sex compulsory where it was once forbidden) the director knew how to control him, but it couldn’t have been easy, especially with his deadly habit of not learning his lines. The late Eric Ambler, who worked on the script of Mutiny on the Bounty, once told me that the reason Brando keeps looking down at the ship’s railing is that it had bits of the script pasted on it, and even in The Godfather, when he came back from career death and was really trying to do his best, there were bits of script stashed all over the set, including on the shirt of the actor he was talking to.
There can be no doubt, incidentally, that Brando often had a legitimate beef even when dealing with real artists instead of the usual con-men. In The Countess from Hong Kong, which he did because he admired Charlie Chaplin, he was appalled to find that Chaplin had no idea which parts of the script were alive and which were dead. For a man so intelligent, even bookish, the disappointments of movie stardom must have been cruel. But his way of being defensive was to use the words as a barricade, behind which he could hugely crouch: more and more hugely as his intake of ice-cream increased. In that posture, he couldn’t say anything straight.
Thomson assumes, usefully, that Olivier could. Again, our author has a good point to state before making too much of it. Olivier could bring the English language alive in his mouth as surely as Brando killed it off. Olivier came from a British stage tradition in which all the leading men checked up on each other’s use, or abuse, of the text, especially if it had been written by Shakespeare. Olivier complained that John Gielgud sang instead of speaking, a slim shaft of bitchery which Thomson, for his argument, would have done better to leave unquoted, because Gielgud really was the complete master of speech. Young actors today, snorting at the starting gate, would do well to take a look at Gielgud on YouTube reciting the great valedictory speech from The Tempest as it was used climactically in Prospero’s Books.
But Olivier’s on-screen Shakespeare plays certainly add up to a tremendous achievement, a cultural high point of the 20th century. His whiplash delivery as Richard III should serve to emphasise, however, that when deprived of Shakespeare’s help he could mangle a written line as badly as any other actor trying to compensate for tone-deafness with super-precise articulation. Listen to him in the voice-overs for The World at War episodes and you wonder why Jeremy Isaacs, in expiation for having cast Olivier as the narrator, did not cast himself from a window. Blithely, or perhaps nervously, careless of where the stresses were meant to be placed, Olivier could give you one false reading after another.
"It comes down largely to appearance. If it came down to acting ability, the biggest screen star of the postwar era would have been Alan Arkin, and Robert Redford would have starred on the covers of knitwear catalogues for males"But that wasn’t Olivier’s main handicap as a screen star. Here we come to a touching illustration of how Thomson, in his latterday role as an omniscient sage, has reached the point where he is unable to say anything elementary: a perennial danger for the professional critic which has perhaps become acute, now that the web is crawling with blog-trolls and rootless nutters who believe that a cultural viewpoint may be transmitted through nothing but opinions, with no effort wasted on the actual writing. He says some subtle and reasonable things about William Holden and Daniel Day-Lewis, but mainly he succumbs to the post-modern mode in which no statements can be made except those too sweeping to be analysed or too idiosyncratic to be contested: historic scope through a peep-hole.
A kind of panic has set in: otherwise a man as smart as Thomson would simply be able to say why Brando was a bankable film star and Olivier wasn’t. When not clad and scripted as English or Danish blank-verse royalty, Olivier was able to carry few movies on his own after That Hamilton Woman. His best screen work is in support, in roles such as the berserk Nazi dentist in Marathon Man, or the tight-lipped English cop—the ideal male model for a mackintosh—in Bunny Lake is Missing. Considering how much he had going for him, one might well ask why.
The answer, sadly, is that it comes down largely to appearance. If it came down to acting ability, the biggest screen star of the postwar era would have been Alan Arkin, and Robert Redford would have starred on the covers of knitwear catalogues for males.
When he lay on his deathbed last November, Mike Nichols might still have been regretting that his film of Catch-22 was never a hit. But by then he must have known why it wasn’t. Take a look at the way Alan Arkin, as the sex-starved Yossarian, groans and writhes when he catches his first glimpse of the symphonically upholstered young blonde female attached to the arm of Orson Welles. The scene couldn’t be better played. On the strength of his abilities, Hollywood—supposedly a citadel of philistinism but in fact crazy about art—gave Arkin many a starring role. He was wonderful in all of them, but the public couldn’t be made to care. In Havana, Arkin gave Robert Redford an acting lesson, but Redford couldn’t give Arkin what he always needed—a lesson in screen presence.
In the movies, screen presence doesn’t depend just on the actor, it depends on us: the way the actor looks has to suit our dreams. An actor might even be too handsome: when the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane called Ben Affleck a prisoner of his own jawline, he was writing true and penetrating cultural criticism. On the other hand, there are actors who look quite normal but they strike us the way that the Species creature would have liked to strike Kingsley. Dreams go deep, and hence there is no point looking for reasons why you can’t stand an actor. I for one have always been ready to eat glass rather than watch a Nicholas Cage movie, and I felt the same way about Matthew McConaughey even after my pitiless younger daughter made me watch True Detective: great stuff, but it had him in it. Perhaps, in the bilges of my psyche, there are the memories of faces that once made me fear for my life, and these actors resemble those prototypes. But when we clear all that psychological clutter aside, we are left with the likelihood that the stars of both main genders strike us as archetypally beautiful. Garbo did that for spectators of both sexes, and so did Cary Grant. If Grant had taken, when it was offered, the starring role in Ninotchka that was played by Melvyn Douglas, the results might have been incandescent. Imagine Grant’s face in the reaction shots during Ninotchka’s most lyrical aria: “bombs may fall… but we have had our moment.” He wouldn’t have had to do anything except look pleased. Least of all would he have felt compelled to examine the décor. In that era, stars were chosen for the way they could blow your mind even if they did nothing. They still are.
There is a role for those who don’t, but the role tends to be further down the bill. I loved Sam Neill when he starred in The Dish. I love Sam Neill in anything, and perhaps partly because his good looks are not unreal, but comfortably consonant with the demands of time. But in the whole of his useful career he has rarely been the star. In the Jurassic Park movies, the star is CGI technology, omnivorous velociraptors from which Neill symbolically runs away: although the time approaches, no doubt, when the actors will be digitalised along with everything else. For the otherwise not completely stupid Troy, Brad Pitt had his thighs digitally enhanced, and it now occurs to me that this electronic tinkering was part of his preparation to deliver the voice-over in the Chanel commercial that made some of us think of giving up on western civilisation altogether. “It’s not a journey. A journey ends. But we go on.” It takes a cyborg to deliver lines like that, and if you haven’t got one you have to build one.
But Brad is a star, even if his upside-down head has been replaced by an algorithm. To catch Neill’s essence and value it, you have to watch him in supporting roles. Look at the delicate and poetically articulated way he gives his great speech in The Hunt for Red October, still by far the best movie in the Jack Ryan franchise. Born and raised in the Soviet Union, Sam’s character is dreaming of the wonders of freedom in the west. “I will have a pick-up truck… or a recreational vehicle.” Sean Connery as the Shoviet shubmarine captain with a shpeech impediment listens in wonder, as well as he might, because he couldn’t have delivered a line like that even if he had been supplied with a pick-up truck of his own. Nor could Olivier have spoken those lines with such an ear to the phonetic balance of the writing, and Brando would have had to read them off Connery’s chest, while adding a few post-hippy anachronisms of his own devising, and—ah, this above all—constantly pausing to scrutinise the layout of the set.
But you can tell what game we’re playing here. We’re getting into the treasure-chest of small change, the necessarily bulky mental coffer where all those memories are stored in which the screen comes fully alive because the acting has successfully twinned itself to reality. Contrary to the opinion of almost all young male actors, it can’t be done by sweeping the crockery off the shelf in anger, as Val Kilmer did in Heat, and as thousands of other screen actors have done ever since the habit of demolishing the props was instituted by guess who?
It was Marlon Brando, in the stage production of Streetcar; and Elia Kazan should have shot him for it—just a little bit, a flesh wound to get his attention. But directors are in thrall to actors too. And quite often even the most maniacal actor is right. In Out of Africa, Robert Redford was never going to shave his head to mimic the baldness of the central character Denys Finch Hatton, but his director Sidney Pollack must have been startled when Redford announced that he had no intention of adopting an English accent either. Leave the acting to Klaus Maria Brandauer and Meryl Streep: the audience wants to see me being me, not me being someone else. And Redford was right. The movie was a starring vehicle. Nearly all successful movies are, and the unsuccessful movies tend to be the ones that not even you and I have heard of.
