Marlon Brando (April 3, 1924 – July 1, 2004), actor and bona fide cultural icon simply doesn’t need any introduction and his legacy amounts to more than 40 movies, known all over the world between 1950 and 2006 (when he appeared in archive footage in two Superman movies).
But, as journalist Jon Wilde observed in a long essay, Brando also died on the week that coincided with the 50th anniversary of the epic moment almost universally accepted as the birth of what we know as rock’n’roll. The day Sam Phillips heard Elvis Presley and his two sidemen performing an Arthur Crudup number called “That’s All Right” at the Sun Studio and felt that what he was hearing was what he’d been looking for.
But, if Elvis was the king of charisma and of rhythm without a doubt, Brando preceded him by a couple of years when it came to lighting the spark of a new, rebellious and tormented generation. The key moments in the genesis of what we can call “Brando rock’n'roll” are basically two – always according to Wilde. The first is when he “exploded in 1951’s A Streetcar Named Desire, he did so with the force of pre-history. When he stood at the foot of that winding staircase in a sweat-drenched tee-shirt and yelled, ‘Stell-aaaah’, with such beautiful storm-tossed anguish, it was a moment as imperatively rock’n’roll as ‘Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom’“. Then there’s the “famous moment in 1953’s The Wild One when Brando, as the leather-clad motorcycle gang leader, brute coolness personified, is asked, ‘What’re you rebelling against, Johnny?’ and replies with the surly open-endedness of the prototypical streetcorner upstart, ‘Whattya got?’”.
Brando obviously can’t be judged purely in terms of acting: it would be like reducing Elvis’ iconic power to chord progressions and vocals inflection. Brando’s powerful impact on popular culture came from his performance; he “became a kind of centripetal force, drawing towards him the restless energies and inarticulate, unfocussed yearnings of the time and giving them suck and shape; all of it as instinctive as the radioactive waves of a cell gravitating to its nucleus“.
So Marlon Brando became an icon of social rebellion before Sam Phillips discovered Elvis’ powerful character at the Sun Studio. He was the first fantasy character promising “something far more potent than freedom itself – the fantasy, the illusion of freedom“.
