This Marlon Brando drawing was composed nearly 51 years ago by New York Review of Books illustrator David Levine. It appeared alongside a 5.17.73 Norman Mailer review of Last Tango in Paris, titled “A Transit to Narcissus.”
In paragraph #6, Mailer writes that early in the Bernardo Bertolucci film “Brando abruptly cashes the check Stanley Kowalski wrote for us twenty-five years ago — he fucks the heroine standing up. It solves the old snicker of how do you do it in a telephone booth? — he rips her panties open.
“In our new line of New Yorker–approved superlatives, it can be said that the cry of the fabric is the most thrilling sound to be heard in World Culture since the four opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth.”
Tango premiered at the 1972 New York Film Festival (10.14.72), but opened commercially on 2.1.73 at Manhattan’s Trans Lux East (Third Avenue between 57th Street and 58th Street). Tickets went for a then-unheard-of price of $5.00.
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