The Essential Marlon Brando

For Brando’s big-screen debut, he did not start small, instead grabbing a lead role for Oscar-winning director Fred Zinneman (From Here to Eternity). He played a paraplegic soldier returning from World War II. He reportedly spent a month in an Army-hospital bed in order to prepare for the role.

[Where to stream The Men.]

In only his second year acting in films, Brando nabbed the first of four consecutive Oscar nominations for Best Actor. Elia Kazan’s adaptation of the great Tennessee Williams play was a star-studded, intensely acted affair, and Brando’s brutish, smoldering performance as Stanley Kowalski is as influential in American culture as any other filmed performance in history. Just ask Elaine Benes.

[Where to stream A Streetcar Named Desire]

Re-teaming with Kazan, Brando got his second Oscar nomination for playing Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. It is of course incrediby easy to look back on Hollywood in the 1950s and point out their unenlightened, ill-considered, and outright racist ways, but there is quaint little Hollywood racism, and then there is Marlon Brando in brownface with a massive sombrero atop his head … and then getting an Oscar nomination for it.

[Where to stream Viva Zapata!]

After making Julius Caesar with Joseph L. Mankiewicz in ’53, Brando’s fourth consecutive Oscar nomination (and third time working with Elia Kazan) was a charm for the iconic On the Waterfront. Hailed as one of the greatest films of all time by everyone from the American Film Institute to the Vatican, Brando’s “I coulda been a contender” just might be the most memorable single line of dialogue from a career that was packed with them.

[Where to stream On the Waterfront.]

In 1955, Brando was the biggest box-office star in Hollywood, and so despite the fact that he had no background (or, well, aptitude) for singing, Mankiewicz desperately wanted him for the role of Sky Masterson in the big-screen musical adaptation. There were on-set tensions with co-star Frank Sinatra (who had been boxed out by Brando not only for the Masterson role but for the lead in On the Waterfront as well), and you couldn’t have found two less compatible personalities when it came to Hollywood iconography. Brando’s performance is not great, but it’s certainly singular, and worth it just to watch a world-class actor in his prime bump up against his limitations.

[Where to stream Guys and Dolls.]

For Brando’s directorial debut, he chose a Western that was at one time meant to be made by Stanley Kubrick from a Sam Peckinpah script. Unsurprisingly, the film is a more cerebral Western than most, with an antihero at the center, which was most certainly a sign of the changing times. The film was not great for Brando’s career, however, and it kicked off a string of unsuccessful projects, including the next year’s Mutiny on the Bounty which, if you watch Listen to Me Marlon you’ll learn was one of his least favorite film experiences.

[Where to stream One-Eyed Jacks.]

After a decade in purgatory, Brando emerged with his legend status intact and cotton balls in his jowls as mafia patriarch Don Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s all-time classic. What more honestly needs to be said about this film or this performance. Even the tales of the accolades — Brando won his second Best Actor Oscar for the film, but he refused to accept it, instead sending Native American actress Sacheen Littlefeather to the stage to speak about Hollywood’s mistreatment of Native Americans on screen — have been retold hundreds of times. See the movie. See it again.

[Where to stream The Godfather.]

Taking advantage of his regained status in the industry, Brando did the very Brando thing of going to France to make a sexually explicit art movie with Bernardo Bertolucci. As iconic as “I coulda been a contender” was to Golden-Age Hollywood filmmaking, Last Tango in Paris‘s sex scenes were just as influential in the world of independent/foreign explicitness on film.

[Where to stream to Last Tango in Paris.]

Brando was famously paid $19 million ($3.7 million as base salary) for his glorified cameo as Superman’s father, though the number of stories that emerged from the production about Brando’s demands and difficulties couldn’t possibly have a price. Once again, Marlon Brando was at the forefront of his profession, even if he was blazing trails in the field of actorly eccentricity.

[Where to stream Superman.]

Once again getting big money for not a lot of screen time, Brando re-teamed with Coppola for the director’s madness-infused Vietnam picture. Brando’s performance as the shadowed Colonel Kurtz may have been brief, but it pretty much instantly became an iconic pillar of his career. His confrontation scene with Martin Sheen did everything that you hire an overpriced legend like Brando to do: bring the entirety of his whole Marlon Brando persona to bear on a character who needs to be many times larger than life.

[Where to stream Apocalypse Now.]

This mob comedy starring Matthew Broderick is certainly a lesser light in Brando’s sky, but watching it, and Brando’s performance as a verrrry thin gloss on Vito Corleone is as good a portrait as any of Brando’s calcification as an actor in the 1990s.

[Where to stream The Freshman.]

Say what you will about the insanity of John Frankenheimer’s H.G. Wells adaptation. And plenty have! This is one of the most notoriously awful movies of the 1990s. Yes, it’s a disaster, but it is a singular disaster, and if you’re looking for one last bonkers Marlon Brando performance (he would act in three more movies after this, with 2001’s The Score being his final film), this is unquestionably it.

[Where to stream The Island of Dr. Moreau.]

You can watch Listen To Me Marlon on the Showtime and Showtime Anytime apps starting on November 14.

Joe Reid (@joereid) is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. You can find him leaving flowers for Mrs. Landingham at the corner of 18th and Potomac.