Last Tango In Paris (1973)

Marlon Brando

Marlon Brando was born in Omaha, Nebraska, where his father was a prosperous farm supplies salesman. His mother, a leading light of the Omaha Community Playhouse, encouraged him to act, but his father hated the idea of a stage career and sent him to military academy. Getting himself expelled, Brando headed for New York, where he studied with Stella Adler and Erwin Piscator and joined the Actor’s Studio. In 1947 he erupted on to Broadway as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, under Elia Kazan’s direction. His sweaty, bellowing, brutish performance won him acclaim as a stage actor of overwhelming talent; but despite professed contempt for film acting he promptly quit the stage for good in favour of the cinemas.

The best-known graduate of the Stanislavskian school of Method acting, Brando trained for his screen début as a paraplegic in Zinnemann’s The Men (1950) by spending weeks in a wheelchair among wounded war veterans. It paid off in a performance of tormented sensitivity concealed under surface truculence. Next he recreated his Streetcar tour de force; again for Kazan (1951), marking the role as his for keeps. In Viva Zapata! (1952), also for Kazan, his clenched intensity as the revolutionary leader redeemed the banalities of Steinbeck’s script. To prove his range, and counter gibes about ‘the scratch-and-mumble school’, he turned to Shakespeare, and as Mark Antony in Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953) earned the admiration of Gielgud.

The Wild One (1954) was a low-budget exploiter about motorcycle gangs. Brando gave it class, his brooding, leather-clad biker achieving iconic status and defining a generation. His third and, and last film for Kazan, On the Waterfront (1954), featured the first of the great Brando masochistic displays, as a beaten, bloody docker who ‘coulda been a contender’ lurches blindly back to work, defying the power of the racketeers.

Six movies, all shrewdly chosen; four Academy nominations, crowned by an Oscar for on the Waterfront; Brando was now the hottest property in Hollywood, despite – or maybe of – his studied non-conformism, slobbing in a T-shirt and jeans, insulting columnists, and scorning the studio publicity machine, it didn’t matter, they loved him. Stunningly handsome (his Roman profile rescued from prettiness by a broken nose), magnetic, dangerous, and witty, he was hailed as the supreme post-war screen actor, against whom every ambitious newcomer must measure himself, quite a daunting task. According to Robert Ryan, Brando ‘ruined a whole generation of actors’; certainly for years afterwards a succession of players – Dean, Newman, Pacino, De Niro – would have to fight their way out of his shadow.

With Desire (1954), an insane costume drama forced on him by Fox in which he played Napoleon, the glowing career showed its first trace of tarnish. There followed some odd choices: Guys and Dolls (1955), where singing and dancing opposite the suavity of Frank Sinatra did him no favours; and Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), where he failed to achieve the requisite comic touch. The Young Lions (1958) was an improvement, though Brando insisted turning his blond Übermensch into a virtuous anti-Nazi. He clashed with Magnani over The Fugitive Kind (1960) and saw off two directors (Kubrick and Peckinapah) on his first western, One-Eyed Jacks (1961), before taking over the reins himself – with more than creditable results.

Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) repeated the pattern. Carol Reed quit; Lewis Milestone, though keeping screen credit, sat back and let Brando do as he liked. What he did was masterly – a languidly insolent Fletcher Christian with an effete British accent. His best movie in the remainder of the decade was Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), potentially overheated melodrama kept faultlessly in check, with Brando giving a portrayal of emotional repression so intense it hurt to watch.

He made his comeback as The Godfather (1972), framing offers no one could refuse in a throaty whisper. A performance of immense, if slightly hammy authority, it earned him his second Oscar, which he refused on political grounds. Last Tango in Paris (1973), practising loveless sex with Maria Schneider in a bare rented room, was deliberate risk-taking that almost came off; at once brutal and helpless, touchingly exposing his vulnerability. As a sadistic ‘regulator’ in Penn’s off-beat Western The Missouri Breaks (1976) he was outrageously mannered, but the film could take it – whereas his bravura turn as Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979) threatened seriously to unbalance Coppola’s powerful epic.

Brando has never disguised his opinion of film-making (‘dull, boring, childish work’) and has repeatedly announced his retirement, but he still returns for the occasional cameo, most of them best forgotten. Yet just on the strength of that devastating run of early performances, bursting with energy, power and sheer physical presence rarely equalled on screen, he still ranks as one of the greatest actors of the cinema.

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Gato Barbieri Last Tango in Paris

Last Tango In Paris: Original MGM Motion Picture Soundtrack $16.98 Steeped in controversy upon its release in 1973, director Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris has since been called everything from nonutilitarian pornography to a cinematic masterpiece. Two key elements that Bertolucci utilized to breath life into Tango's nihilistic themes and the dark, obsessive relationship at its core were Marlon Brando's harrowing, largely improvised performance and the...

LAST TANGO IN PARIS 7 INCH (7 VINYL 45) UK UNITED ARTISTS 1973 ...

LAST TANGO IN PARIS 7 INCH (7 VINYL 45) UK EMI 1973 ...

Last Tango in Paris (El Ultimo Tango En Paris) (Import) [Vhs] (1973/2000) Spanish Subtitles 2000 Edition. Great movie with spanish subtitles. Still in sealed box. Shrinkwrap intact....

Last Tango in Paris $5.99 Our Seller Notes and Fine Print Department:...MGM DVD...in very good shape....1972..about 120 minutes each...Close Captioned...In color.R Rated.....