The 10 Most Essential Marlon Brando Performances

10 Most Essential Marlon Brando PerformancesThere are never fewer than about eight reasons to think about Marlon Brando at any given moment, but right now there are a couple more: it’s 61 years to the day since the release of Elia Kazan‘s peerless “On the Waterfront,” which netted Brando the first of his two Best Actor Oscars, and this week also sees the release of one of the best documentaries of the year, “Listen to Me Marlon.” We’ve had six decades to talk about the brilliance of the first, so a few words about the second, to which we gave a strongly positive review out of the New Directors/New Films Festival, and which, if anything, those of us who’ve seen it since are even more high on.

READ MORE: Watch: Trailer And Clip For Marlon Brando Documentary ‘Listen To Me Marlon’

British director Stevan Riley has previously mounted documentaries on the James Bond franchise, international cricket and the annual Oxford/Cambridge boxing match, but little can really prepare you for the sheer intelligence and craft that has gone into his formally rigorous, astonishingly intimate portrait of this screen legend. Using his unprecedented access to many hours of taped interviews, confessionals and archive footage, much of which has never been seen before (he had the unfettered co-operation of the Brando estate), Riley has built an utterly compelling, resonant, sustaining film using almost nothing but Brando’s own words. It’s a peculiarly philosophical, melancholic and beautiful piece of work, all the more remarkable for diving so deep beneath the skin of one of the most intimidatingly mythologized actors ever to have strolled onto a film set. As such, it’s the rare cinematic biodoc that has a kind of universality that makes it powerful to outsiders, to non-fans, even to those who may be actively wary of the posthumous lionization, almost the deification of Brando as the Actor’s Godhead.

But of course, that formidable reputation didn’t come out of nowhere, and just so you can reorient yourself prior to seeking out “Listen to Me Marlon” (in theaters from tomorrow), here we’ve collected the ten greatest Marlon Brando performances. These are the films that created the myth, now go see the film that recreates the man.

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“A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951) 
Every star owes their career to a single project, but few have reached the kind of overnight fame that Brando achieved with his instantly iconic Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Brando became a draw thanks to Elia Kazan’s debut production of what would become perhaps Tennessee Williams’ best-known play, opposite Jessica Tandy, aged just 24. When the director came to bring the play to the screen four years later, Tandy was replaced by the more famous Vivien Leigh, but Kazan stuck with Brando, who became an instant megastar (and picked up the first of four consecutive Oscar nods) once the film opened. And little wonder. As Stanley, the brutish brother-in-law of fading belle Blanche DuBois (Leigh), Brando is magnetic, even, and almost especially, when he’s barely doing anything at all. Indelibly sexy (yes, even sexier than when Ned Flanders played the role), swaggering, animalistic and balancing a sense of real danger with occasional fleck of childlike joy and even a kind of romance, his performance threatens to topple the film over into the Stanley Kowalski show, and yet here Brando’s still generous enough to be in service of Leigh and his other co-stars. Even today, actors reprising their famous on-stage roles can end up feeling over-the-top and overly theatrical, but that’s never remotely a threat with Brando here: there’s never a moment where he feels anything but real (the performance was based on real-life boxer Rocky Graziano). It’s easy to be hyperbolic about a performance like this, but screen acting was honestly never quite the same after “Streetcar.”

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“Julius Caesar” (1953)
Amid simply one of the greatest casts ever assembled for a Hollywood Shakespeare adaptation (Louis Calhern as Caesar, James Mason as Brutus, John Gielgud as Cassius, Greer Garson as Calpurnia, Deborah Kerr as Portia), to say that Brando is the standout in Joseph L Mankiewicz‘s “Julius Caesar” is both kind of misleading and totally true. Misleading, because the rest of the cast, particularly Mason’s noble Brutus and Gielgud’s devious Cassius, are equally strong, but true because Brando embodies Marc Anthony’s conflicted charisma better than probably any other screen incarnation. It was a risk: the role would net him the third of four consecutive Best Actor nominations, but when casting was first announced, it was met with derision — the great mumbler not just taking on Shakespearean dialogue, but in the “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” address, one of the most famous of the Bard’s political speeches? Brando himself was apprehensive, but taking advice from Shakespearean thesp Gielgud, his diction is crisp and assured, and the words really sing. He commands here, giving Marc Anthony brooding depths as well as glorious handsomeness, which may seem frivolous, but sexing up Shakespeare, especially the political plays, is no mean feat. In fact, there were reports that he and Mason clashed, but looking at it now, their differing approaches work: Mason’s more classical style suits the noble, old-school Republican Rome of Brutus, while Marc Anthony, being played with Brando’s Method edge, is the very embodiment of the new, the young, the impetuous, the dangerous, the end of the status quo.