Although born 100 years ago today, Marlon Brando is still “alive” in a sense, at least by the measure of a fair percentage of Millennials and Zoomers knowing his name and at least one of his great performances — Vito Corleone in The Godfather.
I’d be surprised if most of them have even heard of On The Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, Last Tango in Paris, Viva Zapata, etc. Everything that seems eternal and granite-like crumbles and collapses into rubble and dust.
Posted on 9.30.17: Director-producer George Englund has died at age 91. The only half-decent film he directed was The Ugly American (’63), which starred Marlon Brando as a naive and somewhat arrogant Ambassador to “Sarkhan” (Thailand crossed with South Vietnam) during a politically tumultuous period.
It costarred Eiji Okada, the good-looking guy who played Emmanuelle Riva‘s lover in Hiroshima mon amour and also costarred in Woman in the Dunes.
The Ugly American, which had almost nothing to do plot-wise with Eugene Burdick and William Lederer’s 1958 best-seller, is not a top-tier film but a moderately good one, and it foresaw, of course, the misguided U.S. policies toward resentful Vietnamese patriots that would lead to so much horror and death for so many years.
Englund’s well-written book about Brando, “The Way It’s Never Been Done Before,” was published in 2004. It mentions a late-night soiree Englund shared with Brando in 1955, and which concluded with the two of them shooting the shit in a Santa Monica parking lot. Their conversation was interrupted by a cop, who wanted to know if they were up to something:
