WHAT makes Marlon Brando a genuine artist is his profound exploration of human identity rooted in individual cultural progression, rather than a reflection of an a priori, or given culture; in his case, American. 

Brando’s screen roles explored both acting out authority figures, and questioning them. Brando made numerous films, where his role is one of being in some sort of position of authority, such as ‘THE MEN’, 1950; ‘VIVA ZAPATA’, 1952; ‘JULIUS CAESAR’’ 1953; ‘DESIREE’’ 1954; ‘SAYONARA’, 1957; ‘THE YOUNG LIONS’, 1958; ‘THE UGLY AMERICAN’, 1960; ‘MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY’, 1962; ‘THE CHASE’, 1966; ‘BURN’ 1969; ‘THE GODFATHER’, 1971; ‘APOCALYPSE NOW’’ 1979; ‘ THE FRESHMAN’, 1990. Brando and Kazan
Brando’s career and skill as an actor really began when he joined director Elia Kazan’s ‘Method Acting’ classes in New York. Though his film career began with the role of an angry paraplegic soldier in military hospital in Fred Zinnemann’s ‘The Men’ , it was under Kazan’s film direction in the same year, when Brando starred in Kazan’s adaption of the Tennessee Williams play, ‘A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE’, that he captured a menacing, insensitive working-class character via ‘method acting’. 

In 1952, when Brando played the Mexican revolutionary peasant leader, Emilio Zapata in ‘Viva Zapata’, under Kazan’s direction, his skill as a character actor was evident. The promise was fulfilled in the following year, 1954, with ‘ON THE WATERFRONT’, winning Brando his first Oscar, again directed by Kazan, whose teaching and guidance had an enormous influence on the young actor.

Personal identity
The repetitious roles of working-class males with a rough, though boyish edge, Brando had in these first three films with Kazan began to create a popular real persona for him as a taciturn, mumbling, almost inarticulate young man whose moods could swing from violent outbursts, to disarming tenderness, and even feminine closeness. It was not a definition of his identity, whether on or off-screen, that Brando liked much, and after these three films with Kazan, he never worked under his direction again. 

However, there was an element of Kazan’s teaching that Brando would continue to explore in most of his future films; and that was the relation of the film role to one’s opinion of oneself, and the experience of living in society. Kazan, a Greek immigrant to America, was a socialist in Hollywood, but also a devout patriotic American. His ideals were not expressed as a shallow blind following of socialist, or any dogma, but a criticism of such attitudes; it was a thoughtful critical approach that did not surrender the role of the artist’s self and integrity in order to justify his ideals and opinions. In other words, the artist Kazan fought with own moral conscience, and for this reason Kazan’s films, with or without Brando, presented a balancing act between waywardness and reform, between lawless anarchy and moral responsibility. It was a lesson which became a personal theme running through most of Brando’s future film roles.

Rumour and Brando
Brando, by the content of his roles and his style of acting them, developed into some sort of rebellious actor in the eyes and rumours of those who stereotypically believed in art as a bourgeois readymade system, in which the artist merely carries out a technical programme skillfully, whether as painter, sculptor, writer, poet, playwright, musician, or filmmaker, so that to appear different from this becomes a sort of affront to the convention of ‘culture’, either as already established, or to be established on the agenda of authority figures according to their guidelines. 

Brando’s cinematic example was by no means the first, or last, to contradict a commercial-minded entertainment film industry, which many regarded as an opportunity to material ‘success’, rather than the success of achieving outstanding art, via its creative potential.
Brando became part of an American cinematic tradition which refused to act as though the making of movies (or art in general) is some sort of Utopia, free of social corruption, propagandistic agendas, racism and bigotry, or servile sexual opportunism; so the very films he made became an exposure of such embarrassing pitfalls.

Hollywood peers
Before Brando, many films of Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, Orson Welles, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, and John Garfield especially, rejected both social and artistic complacency in American society, and society in general. Both Montgomery Clift and James Dean would become outstanding additions to this creative tradition involving perhaps the best acting, in the sense of their memorable and effective deliveries on screen.

Marlon Brando would outlive them all, and leave an impressive screen legacy, exploring identity through film.