Guilty Pleasure: Anybody Else Reading The Raunchy New Brando Bio?

[Paladin]

I just acquired and started reading "Brando Unzipped," by Darwin Porter. Sheesh.... Even allowing for some hyperbole, it seems miraculous that Marlon Brando had time for all those brilliant stage and screen performances, as intent as he was on schtupping every prominent show business figure---man and woman---in New York and Hollywood.

Hey, I'll go back to Dickens and Proust NEXT week......

[Justitia]

1. Brando was a lion of a figure - in real life! Insatiable appetite for

experience in life and I think he was regularly disappointed in not finding external intensity that matched his own internal intensity. That somewhat explains his retreat in life to his own private island - figuratively and literally.

I am a huge fan of cinema and young Brando on screen was breathtaking in his craft. He literally inhaled everything around him and reprocessed it out through every pore. In "On the Waterfront", I felt like he reached through the screen and grabbed me - ditto in "A Streetcar Named Desire". In his later performances I think he had resigned himself that he would never find anyone that could match his ability & intensity to connect with his audience and sensed a weariness that he actually used to his advantage in a performance like "Last Tango in Paris".

I have never felt so physically attuned to an actor like Brando in his performances, and it is a damn shame that we probably won't ever have another like him.

In real life, I think it's a tragedy that he never found much satisfaction in the external world, and the magnitude of his personal presence acted as a magnet for such calamity.

[Paladin]

2. Well said.

n/t