How Marlon Brando Changed Acting: Inside a Scene from On the Waterfront

Mar­lon Bran­do has now been gone for more than two decades, and so thor­ough­go­ing was his impact on the art of film act­ing that younger gen­er­a­tions of movie-lovers may have trou­ble pin­ning down what, exact­ly, he did so dif­fer­ent­ly on screen. In the new video above, Evan “Nerd­writer” Puschak shows them — and reminds us — using a sin­gle scene from Elia Kazan’s On the Water­front. No, it’s not the scene you’re think­ing of even if you’ve nev­er seen the movie: Puschak selects an ear­li­er one, a con­ver­sa­tion between Bran­do’s prize­fight­er-turned-long­shore­man Ter­ry Mal­loy and Eva Marie Sain­t’s young Edie Doyle, the sis­ter of the col­league Ter­ry unknow­ing­ly lured to his death.

When Edie asks Ter­ry how he got into box­ing, Ter­ry glances at the floor while launch­ing into his answer. “It’s hard to over­state how rev­o­lu­tion­ary a choice like this was in 1954,” says Puschak. “Actors just did­n’t get dis­tract­ed in this way. Trained in the­atri­cal tech­niques, they hit their spots, artic­u­lat­ed their lines, and per­formed instant­ly leg­i­ble emo­tions for the audi­ence. They did­n’t pause a con­ver­sa­tion to look under the table, turn­ing their head away from the micro­phone in the process, and they cer­tain­ly did­n’t speak while chew­ing food.” Just a few years ear­li­er, “the famous Bran­do mum­ble” would have been unthink­able in a fea­ture film; after On the Water­front, it became an endur­ing part of pop­u­lar cul­ture.

Much of the evo­lu­tion of the motion pic­ture is the sto­ry of its lib­er­a­tion from the tropes of the­ater. The ear­li­est nar­ra­tive films amount­ed to lit­tle more than doc­u­men­ta­tions of stage per­for­mances, sta­t­i­cal­ly framed from the famil­iar per­spec­tive of a spec­ta­tor’s seat. Just as the devel­op­ment of the tech­nol­o­gy and tech­niques for cam­era move­ment and edit­ing allowed cin­e­ma to come into its own on the visu­al lev­el, the nature of the actors’ per­for­mances also had to change. In the mid-nine­teen-for­ties, the elec­tri­fied micro­phone allowed Frank Sina­tra to sing with the cadence and sub­tle­ty of speech; not long there­after, Bran­do took sim­i­lar advan­tage of the tech­no­log­i­cal capa­bil­i­ty of film to cap­ture a range of what would come to be known as his own sig­na­ture idio­syn­crasies.

On the Water­front opened fair­ly close on the heels of the Bran­do-star­ring A Street­car Named Desire and The Wild One; still to come were the likes of One-Eyed Jacks, The God­fa­ther, Last Tan­go in Paris, and Apoc­a­lypse Now. While Bran­do did­n’t appear exclu­sive­ly in acclaimed pic­tures — espe­cial­ly in the lat­er decades of his career — nev­er did he give a whol­ly unin­ter­est­ing per­for­mance. Incor­po­rat­ing the tics, hitch­es, and self-sti­fling impuls­es that afflict all our real-life com­mu­ni­ca­tion, he under­stood the poten­tial of both real­ism and odd­i­ty to bring a char­ac­ter’s inte­ri­or­i­ty out into the open, usu­al­ly against that char­ac­ter’s will. But he nev­er could’ve done it with­out his fel­low per­form­ers to act and react against, not least the for­mi­da­ble Eva Marie Saint: at 101 years old, one of our few liv­ing con­nec­tions to the vital, decep­tive­ly har­row­ing realm of post­war Hol­ly­wood cin­e­ma.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Mar­lon Bran­do Screen Tests for Rebel With­out A Cause (1947)

When Mar­lon Bran­do Refused the Oscar for His Role in The God­fa­ther to Sup­port the Rights of Native Amer­i­cans (1973)

The God­fa­ther With­out Bran­do?: Cop­po­la Explains How It Almost Hap­pened

How Humphrey Bog­a­rt Became an Icon: A Video Essay

Why James Gandolfini’s Tony Sopra­no Is “the Great­est Act­ing Achieve­ment Ever Com­mit­ted to the Screen”: A Video Essay

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.