Marlon Brando before and after make-up for his role as Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather © PARAMOUNT PICTURES Serious face, centre stage David Thomson’s career as a film critic has been a performance worthy of Brando or Olivier CLIVE JAMES ake way for Marlon Brando, but surprisingly few. Mainly the text is con- Laurence Olivier and David fined to memorialising these three. And if you Thomson. Other great doubt that David Thomson counts as a great actors are mentioned in actor, consider that he has built a reputation MDavid Thomson’s new book, for being profound out of a whole lifetime of 1 SERIOUS FACE, CENTRE STAGE doing almost nothing except watching movies. shared my general impression of a classically You and I did the same, but we get called friv- good-looking young man eating the script and olous. David Thomson gets revered. It’s a trib- eructating it back to the atmosphere in a series ute to his serious face, transported carefully of slurred burps and aphasic grunts. Accord- to centre stage and looking all of us in the eye, ing to Thomson, though, Brando was a revo- daring us to call him crazy for being eager to lution. That’s the way the book is organised, in discuss the divine stature of Julia Roberts in fact: Olivier is the last of the ancien régime and Pretty Woman, a movie, which, he says, he has Brando is the whole of the revolution includ- seen “five or six times.” What was he hoping to ing Napoleon. find, Richard Gere’s eyes? My apologies for even momentarily con- juring up Brando’s screen performance as is old head at least as full of screen Napoleon in Désirée, a miasma of portentous performances as mine, Thomson brooding which Thomson prefers to think was strangely chooses, for the focus an act of sabotage on Brando’s part instead of his new short treatise, a skimpy of just his usual digestive attack on the writ- Hhandful of stage performances dating from ten script. I admire Brando too, but only for his very early years. Some of them he actually those moments on screen—they amount to the saw, but only a few. Out there in Australia, I length of about two and a half movies in all— heard about Brando’s performance as Stanley when he showed some respect for the group Kowalski in Elia Kazan’s Broadway produc- enterprise in which he was engaged. tion of A Streetcar Named Desire, but couldn’t Unequivocal admirers of Brando often see it. Thomson, about six years old at the excuse his habit of sabotaging his own starring time, couldn’t have seen it either. He did see vehicles on the grounds that he was so seri- Olivier on stage as Shakespeare’s Othello—I ous about his craft he couldn’t bear a context saw that too, the year I got to England—and that was not true to life. There is something earlier he had seen Olivier as Archie Rice in in that idea, but not much. He did, after all, the Royal Court production of John Osborne’s walk away from the editing of One-Eyed Jacks, The Entertainer. Even though Thomson was a movie he not only starred in, but directed. only 15, it must have been a formative experi- In other words, after half a career of bitching ence, with every detail of Olivier’s sweat-wet about lack of control, when he got control he make-up clear to the future critic’s piercing didn’t know what to do with it. Cope with the scrutiny. irrationality of that, and you are ready to cope But he never saw Brando on stage in Street- with his apparently wilful, indeed suicidal, car: if he had, half the book would have no determination to add an extra dimension to other subject. He saw Brando’s Stanley the his role as Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the way I did: in the movie. He must therefore have Bounty. The dimension he added was histrion- 2 SERIOUS FACE, CENTRE STAGE ics. Any of our modern-day male screen stars Attenborough must have been nursing a large who pad out a role by peppering each speech gun. Otherwise Kingsley, while pronouncing with pauses and looking sideways in six differ- on the virtues of passive resistance, would have ent directions is being histrionic in a way that been busy verifying optically the existence of Brando invented. My friend Antonia Quirke India. argues that James Stewart pioneered the The accumulated insanity of Brando’s her- screen mumble but Stewart’s use of the device itage through the generations should be kept had only limited scope, because eventually in mind when we assess his brilliance in Julius the written lines got through uninjured. In his Caesar, On the Waterfront, Guys and Dolls and speeches, Brando could make even the visuals The Godfather. In all four cases (we could make mumble. It was a kind of achievement, but a it five if time had not so cruelly overtaken Last dubious one for him and a disaster for all those Tango in Paris by making on-screen sex com- younger actors who copied him, and therefore pulsory where it was once forbidden) the direc- a continuing disaster for all of us. tor knew how to control him, but it couldn’t “Any of our male screen stars who pad out a role with pauses is being histrionic in a way that Brando invented” In the movie Species Ben Kingsley and have been easy, especially with his deadly habit Michael Madsen staged a competition for who of not learning his lines. The late Eric Ambler, could look sideways more often. Madsen won it who worked on the script of Mutiny on the by actually turning his back on the camera to Bounty, once told me that the reason Brando look out of a window that wasn’t there. Should keeps looking down at the ship’s railing is that you see Species again, if only to check up on it had bits of the script pasted on it, and even whether Natasha Henstridge could really be in The Godfather, when he came back from that beautiful while harbouring within her career death and was really trying to do his skin a gigantic multi-branched mucoid alien, best, there were bits of script stashed all over check out the way that Kingsley, while talk- the set, including on the shirt of the actor he ing, and even more when someone else is talk- was talking to. ing, looks to every part of the screen as if his There can be no doubt, incidentally, that feet were shackled to the floor in the middle Brando often had a legitimate beef even when of an art gallery. That he didn’t do the same dealing with real artists instead of the usual when starring as Mahatma Gandhi is a tribute con-men. In The Countess from Hong Kong, to the late Richard Attenborough’s powers as a which he did because he admired Charlie disciplinarian. As he sat in his director’s chair, Chaplin, he was appalled to find that Chaplin 3 SERIOUS FACE, CENTRE STAGE Robert Redford and Meryl Streep in Out of Africa had no idea which parts of the script were alive all the leading men checked up on each oth- and which were dead. For a man so intelligent, er’s use, or abuse, of the text, especially if it even bookish, the disappointments of movie had been written by Shakespeare. Olivier com- stardom must have been cruel. But his way of plained that John Gielgud sang instead of being defensive was to use the words as a bar- speaking, a slim shaft of bitchery which Thom- ricade, behind which he could hugely crouch: son, for his argument, would have done better more and more hugely as his intake of ice- to leave unquoted, because Gielgud really was cream increased. In that posture, he couldn’t the complete master of speech. Young actors say anything straight. today, snorting at the starting gate, would Thomson assumes, usefully, that Olivier do well to take a look at Gielgud on YouTube could. Again, our author has a good point to reciting the great valedictory speech from The state before making too much of it. Olivier Tempest as it was used climactically in Prospe- could bring the English language alive in his ro’s Books. mouth as surely as Brando killed it off. Olivier But Olivier’s on-screen Shakespeare plays came from a British stage tradition in which certainly add up to a tremendous achievement, 4 SERIOUS FACE, CENTRE STAGE a cultural high point of the 20th century. His but mainly he succumbs to the post-modern whiplash delivery as Richard III should serve mode in which no statements can be made to emphasise, however, that when deprived of except those too sweeping to be analysed or too Shakespeare’s help he could mangle a writ- idiosyncratic to be contested: historic scope ten line as badly as any other actor trying to through a peep-hole. compensate for tone-deafness with super-pre- A kind of panic has set in: otherwise a man cise articulation. Listen to him in the voice- as smart as Thomson would simply be able to overs for The World at War episodes and you say why Brando was a bankable film star and wonder why Jeremy Isaacs, in expiation for Olivier wasn’t. When not clad and scripted as having cast Olivier as the narrator, did not cast English or Danish blank-verse royalty, Olivier himself from a window.