The Machiavellian bias of the Method is ideally suited to the ritualized conversations of organized criminals. Hence, it is surprising that Brando has not played gangsters more often. The very mystique of Method Acting presumes the existence of an emotional substratum swirling with fear and suspicion under every line of dialogue. Curiously, Brando has come to embody, often brilliantly, a culturally fashionable mistrust of language as an end in itself. Even the famous taxicab scene with Rod Steiger in “On the Waterfront” operates vocally (though not physically or emotionally) as a syncopated Brando soliloquy, a riff on the upper registers of sensitivity and vulnerability resonating all the more in counterpoint to Steiger’s more evenly cadenced street glibness and shrillness. Brando’s greatest moments are thus always out of vocal synch with other performers. That is why his best roles have always played against the voice by negating it as a mechanism of direct communication. Brando’s range has always been more limited by his voice than his Faustian admirers cared to admit. There was no mistaking the voice even with the slow-motion throaty whine Brando used to disguise it. When Brando himself finally materialized on the screen as Don Vito Corleone, I could see it was Brando all the way. (I learned later that the face and voice in question for the role of Bonasera belonged to a 20th-billed actor named Salvatore Corsitto who gets no points for looking like himself.) I suddenly recalled the plot of the novel and thus I realized that the face looming in front of me did not resemble Brando’s simply because it wasn’t Brando’s. I began groping for adjectives like “eerie” and “unearthly.” Gradually the face began to recede into the background, and I heard a familiarly high-pitched voice somewhere in the foreground. And the voice was equally shattering in it unfamiliar pitch. It didn’t look anything at all like Brando. How had Brando managed it? The eyes, the ears, the nose, the chin. The picture opened with a face outlined against a splotched blue background with no spatial frame of reference, a background not so much abstract as optically mod with a slow zoom to take us into the milieu by degrees. I must admit that some of the advance hype had gotten to me by the time I sat braced in my seat for the screening of “The Godfather.” I was determined to discern Brando beneath any disguise mere humans could devise. More than one whisperer intimated that Brando’s make-up (by Dick Smith, the auteur also of Dustin Hoffman’s Shangri-La face-furrows in “Little Big Man”) was so masterful that the Brando we all know and love had disappeared completely beneath it. More exclamation, in fact, than explanation. The word from advance hush-hush screenings was wow all caps and exclamation point. That is the way the movie has been programmed and promoted: Brando, Brando, Brando, and more Brando. It seems that the first question everyone asks about “THE GODFATHER” is concerned with Marlon Brando’s interpretation of the title role.
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