Marlon Brando has now been gone for more than two decades, and so thoroughgoing was his impact on the art of film acting that younger generations of movie-lovers may have trouble pinning down what, exactly, he did so differently on screen. In the new video above, Evan “Nerdwriter” Puschak shows them — and reminds us — using a single scene from Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront. No, it’s not the scene you’re thinking of even if you’ve never seen the movie: Puschak selects an earlier one, a conversation between Brando’s prizefighter-turned-longshoreman Terry Malloy and Eva Marie Saint’s young Edie Doyle, the sister of the colleague Terry unknowingly lured to his death.
When Edie asks Terry how he got into boxing, Terry glances at the floor while launching into his answer. “It’s hard to overstate how revolutionary a choice like this was in 1954,” says Puschak. “Actors just didn’t get distracted in this way. Trained in theatrical techniques, they hit their spots, articulated their lines, and performed instantly legible emotions for the audience. They didn’t pause a conversation to look under the table, turning their head away from the microphone in the process, and they certainly didn’t speak while chewing food.” Just a few years earlier, “the famous Brando mumble” would have been unthinkable in a feature film; after On the Waterfront, it became an enduring part of popular culture.
Much of the evolution of the motion picture is the story of its liberation from the tropes of theater. The earliest narrative films amounted to little more than documentations of stage performances, statically framed from the familiar perspective of a spectator’s seat. Just as the development of the technology and techniques for camera movement and editing allowed cinema to come into its own on the visual level, the nature of the actors’ performances also had to change. In the mid-nineteen-forties, the electrified microphone allowed Frank Sinatra to sing with the cadence and subtlety of speech; not long thereafter, Brando took similar advantage of the technological capability of film to capture a range of what would come to be known as his own signature idiosyncrasies.
On the Waterfront opened fairly close on the heels of the Brando-starring A Streetcar Named Desire and The Wild One; still to come were the likes of One-Eyed Jacks, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, and Apocalypse Now. While Brando didn’t appear exclusively in acclaimed pictures — especially in the later decades of his career — never did he give a wholly uninteresting performance. Incorporating the tics, hitches, and self-stifling impulses that afflict all our real-life communication, he understood the potential of both realism and oddity to bring a character’s interiority out into the open, usually against that character’s will. But he never could’ve done it without his fellow performers to act and react against, not least the formidable Eva Marie Saint: at 101 years old, one of our few living connections to the vital, deceptively harrowing realm of postwar Hollywood cinema.
Related content:
Marlon Brando Screen Tests for Rebel Without A Cause (1947)
The Godfather Without Brando?: Coppola Explains How It Almost Happened
How Humphrey Bogart Became an Icon: A Video Essay
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.