New book on Marlon Brando looks at the film legend’s impact on popular culture
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While he was researching subjects for his next book in 2022, writer-producer-author Burt Kearns noted that the centennial of Marlon Brando’s birth was coming up: April 3, 2024 (this past Wednesday). At the same time, he understood that the world didn’t need another Brando biography. “There had already been so many of those,” Kearns notes, “including one that Brando himself collaborated on.” Yet he was fascinated by the actor (who died in 2004) who perfected The Method. And as a longtime journalist, the more Kearns dug into the life and career of Brando, the more astounded he grew at the influence the acting legend had on Western society, popular culture and the American psyche.
“And it all goes back to Brando’s role in the 1953 film ‘The Wild One’,” Kearns asserts, “and that singular image.”
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The image of which the author speaks is the one of Brando that graces the cover of his fascinating new book, “Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel” that was released on Tuesday and available over Amazon and wherever books are sold. That photo shows Brando leaning over the handlebars of his motorcycle, clad in a tight leather jacket and a biker cap tilter tantalizingly over his right eye. His lips are slightly parted, his expression challenging. It was the photo that launched a thousand interpretations, embodying fearlessness, vulnerability, masculinity, femininity, rebellion and fury all at once.
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This portrait of untamed youth, combined with Brando’s wild and restless personal life and the roles he chose to play on stage and screen, helped transform the way America saw itself. That’s the point of Kearns’ book. The image would be absorbed by actors including Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Elvis Presley, James Dean and later Leonardo DiCaprio and Ryan Gosling as well as pop culture icon Andy Warhol.
“The choices that Brando made in his character in the movie – and the reasons he had for making the movie – had this incredible influence that people never could have imagined,” Kearns observes. “The fact that he chose to play this revel motorcycle gang leader Johnny Stabler with a soft Tennessee Williams accent in a leather jacket and jeans, as opposed to the way real biker gangs were dressed, led not only to a youth revolution but also had a tremendous effect on gay culture. I mean, the queer interpretation of ‘The Wild One’ is not subtext – it’s text. It’s right in front of you. It’s in the script itself. And this was far from common in 1953.”
Yes, it’s undeniable that “The Wild One” – based on the short story “Cyclists Raid” by writer Frank Rooney – launched a generation of biker flicks and teen rebellion movies. But at the time, it was also seen as a serious statement on issues that were impacting America at the time in the early 1950s, Kearns emphasizes. “Motorcycle gangs at the time were by displaced veterans who came back from World War II who were unsure about their place in society,” he says, “and they gathered in groups. Juvenile delinquency was also on the rise postwar. And if you look at some of the studies done at the time with youth gangs, there was also homosexuality being practiced within the gangs.
“So when you look at ‘The Wild One’,” Kearns continues, “you’ve got an all-male group hugging together and using mop heads as fake wigs and playing women. Brando hopes the issues with veterans feeling adrift and drawn together would come to the fore. But instead, with the censorship of the time, all that came across was the chaos. The causes of it stayed hidden. It was the causes that drew Brando to want to play the role.”
Indeed, the homoerotic overtones of “The Wild One” appear to have been intentionally wrought by Brando. He was always frank about his affairs with box sexes as a leader of the sexual revolution and icon of queer culture, defying stereotypes and redefining sexual boundaries in his life and in the roles of played. When Brando signed on to star in “The Wild One,” he was coming off his breakout success in the film adaptation of “A Streetcar Named Desire” – with roles in “Viva Zapata!” and “Julius Caesar” in-between. He would write his own ticket, and he chose to write it at that moment as a pouty biker leader.
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Part of what Kearns learned in his research was that Brando “had this tremendous gift as an actor, but it didn’t mean much to him. Activism was so much more important to him. Acting was just something that came naturally to him, and he saw it as a tool. This was a guy who was brought up by a very distant and philandering father and an alcoholic mother. He was probably a victim of child sexual abuse by his nanny. He saw himself as a damaged person. He grew quickly into a rebel in search of causes.”
Those causes came to include early support for Israel, civil rights, what was then known as gay liberation, environmentalism and, famous, the American Indian movement that crystalized in his rejection of his Academy Award in 1973 for “The Godfather” via Sacheen Littlefeather’s non-acceptance speech. “That stunt at the Oscars really kicked off the idea of using the Academy Awards as a political podium,” Kearns stresses. “But that activism was nothing new for Brando. He’d been putting his beliefs ahead of his acting career for maybe 15 years already at that point.”
It was the turbulent Sixties that really came to define the Brando legacy of social consciousness, Kearns discovered in his book research,
“He was hanging out with thew Black Panthers, he was marching with Martin Luther King on behalf of civil rights, he was doing everything he could to bring attention to Native Americans and use his platform for good,” Kearns points out. “Yet he got a lot of criticism because he never played Hamlet, he never returned to Broadway after ‘Streetcar.’ People charged him with neglecting his career. At the same time, he never phoned in a performance. And he changed the way people acted in films with the way he inhabited characters rather than just read lines.”
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