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One day when he was 17, Marlon Brando took a bottle of hair tonic to school. When nobody was looking, he dribbled a thin stream of the stuff down a corridor, into an empty study room, and up the front wall. On the wall he scrawled, with the almost invisible liquid, a shocking word. Next period, when the room was full, he set a match to the hair tonic. Blue flame whooshed through the room, and the handwriting on the wall that day was nothing short of illuminating.
A little more than a decade later, Bad Boy Brando, still something of a showoff, has pulled the trick again. But this time his wall is a hundred thousand movie screens, his performance is distinctly more artistic, and his audience is the popeyed world. Six pictures in four years—The Men, A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata!, Julius Caesar, The Wild One, On the Waterfront—have branded the Brando name and face blue-hot on the public mind.
In a business where money talks, Brando is now being hailed as "a real drag-'em-in big-tenner like nobody since Clark Gable." And his pictures have won loud, critical huzzahs as well as some stentorian box-office grosses. Last week Brando completed a seventh, Désirée, a film version of Annemarie Selinko's 1953 bestselling novel, in which he plays Napoleon. Twentieth Century-Fox boldly predicts that it may take in up to $10 million. "Two more like Brando," said one producer, "and television can crawl back in the tube."
Byron from Brooklyn. One like Brando, as a matter of fact, is more than Hollywood has been able to handle, or even figure out. The big studios, which are capable of taking endless pains to exploit either a valuable property or an eccentric personality, have not yet been able to answer the basic question: What is Brando, and what does he have that the U.S. public seems to want more of?
It could hardly be conventional good looks. Brando has a nose that drips down his face, according to a make-up man, "like melted ice cream" (it caused him to flunk his first screen test ten years ago). But then again, as one fan tried to explain, he does have a kind of "lyric lunkishness—he looks like a Lord Byron from Brooklyn." Is sex appeal his secret? No doubt about it, said one producer: "He's a walking hormone factory." An exhibitor, musing about his own business, said: "He's everybody between 10 and 20 that comes into my theater, and they're really coming to see themselves. He's the Valentino of the bop generation, and he's bringing the kids back to the movies."