Search Results

Advanced Search

31 to 45 of 45 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

On Trying to Be Portugal

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Zionist Terrorism, 6 August 2009

‘A Senseless, Squalid War’: Voices from Palestine 1945-48 
by Norman Rose.
Bodley Head, 278 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 0 224 07938 9
Show More
Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War against Jewish Terrorism 1945-48 
by David Cesarani.
Heinemann, 290 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 0 434 01844 4
Show More
Show More
... in tone, written by Ben Hecht, an ardent Irgun supporter, and starring the 22-year-old Marlon Brando. A quainter showbiz connection came when American arms were secretly acquired for the incipient Jewish state and smuggled out by Teddy Kollek, later mayor of Jerusalem, with the help of Meyer Lansky, the mobster whose associates controlled the ...

So Hard to Handle

John Lahr: In Praise of Joni Mitchell, 22 February 2018

Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell 
by David Yaffe.
Farrar, Straus, 420 pp., £20, October 2017, 978 0 374 24813 0
Show More
Show More
... was a stand-up comedian who never set one loafered foot on a Broadway stage. And then there’s Marlon Brando who, according to Yaffe, came to prominence with On the Waterfront (1954), missing by the best part of a decade his volcanic performance as Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), which made him a household name. Speaking of the emotional ...

Always the Same Dream

Ferdinand Mount: Princess Margaret, 4 January 2018

Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret 
by Craig Brown.
Fourth Estate, 423 pp., £16.99, September 2017, 978 0 00 820361 0
Show More
Show More
... that not to meet the Snowdons was ‘like being in the Garden of Eden without seeing God’. Marlon Brando persuaded Kenneth Tynan to ask her to dinner à trois and then was so tongue-tied that he couldn’t address a word to her except through Tynan: ‘Would you ask the princess what she thinks of …’ Tynan himself wanted to postpone his ...

A Little Swine

Sheila Fitzpatrick: On Snitching, 3 November 2005

Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero 
by Catriona Kelly.
Granta, 352 pp., £17.99, May 2005, 1 86207 747 9
Show More
Show More
... names before the House Un-American Activities Committee) in On the Waterfront (1954), starring Marlon Brando as a longshoreman who risks his life by breaking ranks and denouncing the mob; while the counter-view of denunciation as betrayal was presented in Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge (1955), the story of a docker who turns in his wife’s ...

Let’s not overthink this

Michael Wood, 9 September 1993

... really about violence at all, but about knowhow and determination and competition – we think of Marlon Brando getting the speed to return to his broken hand in One-Eyed Jacks. Munny doesn’t get any skill back, he just gets a big gun, and takes the town by surprise. We are also not displeased to see Little Bill get blown away, because he is a law ...

Who’s in charge?

Chalmers Johnson: The Addiction to Secrecy, 6 February 2003

Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers 
by Daniel Ellsberg.
Viking, 498 pp., $29.95, October 2002, 0 670 03030 9
Show More
Show More
... Now, John Milius, has said that the character of Kurtz, the maniacal American officer played by Marlon Brando, was inspired by Rheault. Ellsberg was enraged by all the lies Resor proffered in his defence and by the comments of various Congressmen on how bad it would be for morale should American troops face criminal charges ‘just for killing one ...

Olivier Rex

Ronald Bryden, 1 September 1988

Olivier 
by Anthony Holden.
Weidenfeld, 504 pp., £16, May 1988, 0 297 79089 7
Show More
Show More
... of proportion to the rest of his body – and as unsafe. ‘Laurence Olivier is less gifted than Marlon Brando,’ wrote William Redfield in Letters from an Actor. ‘He is even less gifted than Richard Burton, Paul Scofield, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud. But he is still the definitive actor of the 20th century. Why? Because he wanted to ...

In His Pink Negligée

Colm Tóibín: The Ruthless Truman Capote, 21 April 2005

The Complete Stories 
by Truman Capote.
Random House, 400 pp., $24.95, September 2004, 0 679 64310 9
Show More
Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote 
edited by Gerald Clarke.
Random House, 487 pp., $27.95, September 2004, 0 375 50133 9
Show More
Show More
... In Cold Blood, it is possible that he would now be famous merely for his New Yorker profile of Marlon Brando, ‘The Duke in His Domain’, which is a masterpiece, and maybe the movie of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The letters, on the other hand, are superb. He is funny about his fame. He is only 22 when he writes: ‘There is a morbid photograph of me ...

Seeing Stars

Alan Bennett: Film actors, 3 January 2002

... falling for the Jewish girl – as a moral education in the same way, for example, that the Marlon Brando character is educated in On the Waterfront. That would be the convention, and one I’d so much taken for granted that I kept looking in the Malle film for signs of this instruction in the school of life beginning to happen. But it ...

The Raging Peloton

Iain Sinclair: Boris Bikes, 20 January 2011

... labourers, schoolchildren, office workers, and street gangs pretending they are riding with Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Patrick Wright, in Passport to Peking, quotes the Labour politician Morgan Phillips, who visited China as part of a delegation in 1954. ‘As I saw the great mass of cycles on the road I was reminded of a day in Bedford during ...

I thought you were incredible

Bee Wilson: Elizabeth Taylor’s Magic, 16 November 2023

Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon 
by Kate Andersen Brower.
HarperCollins, 495 pp., £25, December 2022, 978 0 00 843582 0
Show More
Show More
... which include the lead in Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder had written it with him in mind) and the Marlon Brando part in On the Waterfront. Meeting Clift gave Taylor a vision of an acting life in which she could call some of the shots.Taylor’s parents were both Americans – her father, Francis, was an art dealer – but they were living in London when ...

This Singing Thing

Malin Hay: On Barbra Streisand, 12 September 2024

My Name Is Barbra 
by Barbra Streisand.
Century, 992 pp., £35, November 2023, 978 1 5291 3689 0
Show More
Show More
... She dated O’Neal before What’s Up, Doc?, introducing him to Bogdanovich, and made friends with Marlon Brando (he asked to fuck her; she asked if he had got his teeth capped). She may have slept with Warren Beatty – ‘I guess I did. Probably once.’ She met the Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau at a London premiere and nearly married him after ...

Diary

Stephen Frears: That's Hollywood, 20 December 1990

... Hare’s dialogue for Saigon, Year of the Cat. When I asked him why, he said: ‘Can you imagine Marlon sticking to the text?’ Forrest had been in Apocalypse Now, and had watched Brando climbing palm trees in the Philippines and throwing coconuts at Coppola. When in the heat of filming I asked Forrest what Coppola would ...

Cutty, One Rock

August Kleinzahler: My Big Bad Brother, 21 August 2003

... mug: good bones, a nicely shaped head, straight nose, brown eyes, full mouth. A bit like the young Marlon Brando, in fact, especially around the eyes. In this good fortune, he took after the men on my mother’s side of the family. Me, I got stuck with the other. In retrospect, for someone that good-looking and wild, he didn’t have a lot of girlfriends ...

‘I’m glad what I done’

Gavin Millar, 13 October 1988

A Life 
by Elia Kazan.
Deutsch, 848 pp., £17.95, June 1988, 0 233 98292 2
Show More
Show More
... now to express that resentment in the films, particularly in On the Waterfront (1954). ‘When Brando, at the end, yells at Lee Cobb, the mob boss, “I’m glad what I done you hear me? – glad what I done!” that was me saying, with identical heat, that I was glad I’d testified as I had.’ Kazan and Schulberg befriended the ‘stoolie’ docker Tony ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences