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Brando refuses to see her, resents any attempt to help him. He struggles up from complete despair to an awakened will to live, then to physical rehabilitation, hope —and further disillusionment, and finally, after he has grappled with the facts and not been thrown, to his real beginning. It is a growing-up process that the girl, in her different way, must go through too. Their suffering, and the glimpses of the other characters' struggles, make the film a moving salute to the human spirit.
The Men's flaws are such minor ones as Dimitri Tiomkin's musical score, which is so overexcited that it sometimes gets in the way of the action. Director Fred (The Search) Zinneman's sensitive work clearly places him in the first rank of screen directors. The film is full of fine performances, especially by Actors Sloane and Webb and Actress Wright. Broadway's Marlon Brando, in his first movie appearance, does a magnificent job. His halting, mumbled delivery, glowering silences and expert simulation of paraplegia do not suggest acting at all; they look chillingly like the real thing.
Broadway's 26-year-old Marlon Brando spent his first four weeks in Hollywood learning to live in a wheelchair with 31 paraplegics in a veterans' hospital ward. By the time shooting started on The Men, intense, moody Actor Brando knew, as well as any whole man could, how it feels to be paralyzed from the waist down.
Such wholehearted concentration on his craft may partly explain Nebraska-born Brando's rapid rise to stardom. Without much formal education, he left home at 19 to make a name for himself on the stage. He was luckier than most. After a year's study at Manhattan's Dramatic Workshop and in summer stock, he was cast by Rodgers & Hammerstein as the son in their 1944 I Remember Mama. From then on, says Brando, "I never had to look for work."
In quick succession he got fat parts in Maxwell Anderson's short-lived Truckline Cafe, Katharine Cornell's production of Candida and Ben Hecht's A Flag Is Born. In 1947, he found himself an overnight Broadway sensation as the brutish lout of a husband in A Streetcar Named Desire. He is still not certain that he fully "succeeded in some aspects of the part," in spite of the fact that one critic called him "our theater's most memorable young actor at his most memorable."
After seeing his performance in The Men, Hollywood began to believe Brando's extravagant advance publicity. His personal eccentricities, as well as his acting skill, had the film colony agog. He appeared to be the first genuine "character" since Garbo. Dressed in his usual cotton T-shirt and greasy jeans, Brando shunned the big stars and their glittering parties, brushed Hedda Hopper aside with a few vague grunts, spent most of his time roaming the back alleys and bars, sometimes without shoes. The $150 weekly allowance from his father (who invests the rest of Brando's earnings in Nebraska cattle) was always gone in a few days, much of it handed out in fistfuls to friends, shoeshine boys and waitresses.