| I'm inclined to write
about the movie acting of Marlon Brando who was 77 years old this April and who, if we are
fortunate, will be with us another 77 years. As you may well know, Brando’s acting
for the camera has been proclaimed and critiqued. His life as an actor has been hailed and
hashed. Regardless of commentary, by and large his oeuvre stands up without apology. TIME
magazine was inspired to name him screen actor of the 20th century. For his most recent
performance in The Score, though he plays a linchpin of the underworld, he is
beautifully lit. He looks like an angel or, not for the first time, like a god. In 1958 in
The Young Lions, he is referred to as “a young golden god of war,” in
the role of Christian Diestl, a seasonal ski instructor inducted as a Nazi lieutenant.
Indeed, after discarding various wigs, Brando had his hair bleached blond or as it turned
out “lemon yellow.” The color, but not the lightness, was ultimately lost in the
black-and-white film. Another of the young lions, Montgomery Clift, called Brando’s
work “sloppy.” But as film critic Richard Schickel argues in BRANDO, “This
is not sloppy work. It is, in fact, more interesting than Clift’s, which is a version
of his performance in From Here to Eternity...In Brando’s long absences
[from the screen] one misses him.” Clift shares no more screen time with Brando than
a non-verbal encounter culminating in Diestl’s death, a scene that caused Brando to
dislocate his shoulder when rolling down a hill. Perhaps that was what Clift meant by
sloppy, that Brando took a sloppy fall and hurt himself. He didn't hurt the film though.
It's a nicely rough-and-tumble fall, following upon Diestl’s being shot by
Clift’s American solider companion, played by Dean Martin.
The Young Lions is one of two of Brando’s more than 35 movies in which he
employs a German accent. The other is The Saboteur: Code Name Morituri (1965).
There is of course something silly about casting English-speaking actors as Germans among
Germans in Germany and then having them speak English with German accents, but that was
the convention. Brando picked up his German accent from an actor friend who specialized in
accents and then mastered it on location with a vocal coach. The gist of his rendition is
nothing new: a v sound in place of a w; a somewhat sibilant s or z for a th. But there is
something special in the way he places the sound. He has Christian Diestl emit words
cautiously from some region of the upper pallet and in a pitch slightly higher than
Brando’s own norm, almost as if Diestl is using his mouth to protect the language.
The effect is a considerate person who holds himself back.
To understand the emotional ramifications of Brando’s accent, I would like to
offer what his acting teacher Stella Adler had to say about speech adjustments, as
reported in my ACTING WITH ADLER:
In the realm of accents and dialects, also governed by the technique of making a
physical adjustment, Adler again opted for simplicity. We were taught to change just
enough of our pronunciation to produce the sense of an accent, not to revamp our entire
speech. For example, by placing the r sound far back in the throat and rolling it as if
gargling, we could produce one aspect of a simple French accent. With this r sound and, at
most, two other French sounds, and with nothing else belonging to the French, we could
create an illusion of something French. But since we were not French, we were not to
attempt to control the entire culture. What we were to control was our speech,
selectively.
With Christian Diestl, Brando manages to control not only the speech but also, in some
sense, contrary to Stella Adler’s expectations, the entire culture, in this case, the
culture of German soldiery. His Christian Diestl sounds right and then some. In his way of
speaking, in his way of communicating, in his way of comportment, he is the essence and
the very picture of a good German warrior. We get from Brando’s accent that Diestl is
thoughtful and careful; that he is upright and fastidious. Brando is not doing an
impression and he is not mimicking a type. He is using the accent distinctively to help
build a character. Brando spares his portrayal any hint of cliché, even though cliché
would have been the easy avenue to a WWII German soldier. As Schickel points out,
Brando’s Christian Diestl is “always loyal, humanly and rather touchingly so to
the larger cultural tradition that formed both the light and the dark sides of a national
[German] character.” ? yet not trite and not platitudinous, but individualized.
We know that Brando was rewriting his role day by day as the filming progressed. He was
giving Christian Diestl new lines. At times, rather than trying to memorize the new lines,
he was reading them from papers pinned to the costume of his scene partner or papers
secreted on the set. He was looking for language appropriate to Diestl and he was
discovering spontaneity. He was able to get spontaneity because he had made the accent his
own. If he had only learned how to accent the words of the script, his accent would have
gotten lost in any rewrites. His overall speech would have been a fractured mess. But he
did make the accent his own and used it with the discipline of a German soldier. |
