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“... rootlessness. Cinema as a medium urges us to view ourselves as actors presenting ourselves. So Marlon Brando could be a paraplegic after the war, he could be Zapata, Napoleon, a mafia don, or Lee Clayton, swanning around the Missouri Breaks country in a dress, a bonnet and an italic Irish accent. He might be a used-up ex-boxer on the Jersey docks. Or ...”

“... Marlon Brando didn’t believe in acting, except in real life, and he took every opportunity, in interviews and his autobiography, to trash the profession. It’s tempting to say this is why he was a great movie actor, but the story is more complicated. For much of the time he performed on screen like a person who didn’t believe in acting, and threw a lot of his career away ...”

“... makes up for (nearly) everything, however, with a terrific anecdote about Truman Capote and Marlon Brando. CAPOTE: You tell him about yourself, and slowly spin your web so that he tells you everything. That’s how I trapped Marlon. BRANDO: The little bastard spent half the ...”

“... fallen idols of American popular culture, challenging listeners to ‘name the last good film that Marlon Brando made/While trying to keep his kid from going to jail.’ ‘Too late to crash, too late to burn, too late to die young,’ goes the chorus. The song is softened somewhat by the singer’s sense of his own life lacking much direction or ...”

“... a Communist or a socialist, Willard’s host (played by Christian Marquand, an old actor friend of Brando’s and the director of Candy) gives an eloquent explanation of why they must stay in this place where they are not wanted, where their time is plainly over. The place is ours, he says, we brought the rubber from Brazil and planted it. ‘We want to stay ...”

“... world into the shape we first thought of. Very likely we would have got around to dreaming up Brando and Garbo at about the time of the woolly mammoths, and what’s more, they would still be with us in their perfect form because, as knowing and committed dreamers, we would have had the good sense not to ask them what they thought about anything. As it ...”

“... to his school magazine railed against ‘security’, eulogising, in tones apparently inspired by Marlon Brando in The Wild One, the ideal of ‘true courage: the kind which enables men to face the unknown regardless of the consequences’. That outlaw pose adopted in his teenage conflicts with Southern authority has never been dropped. In ‘The ...”

“... He is clumsy and unaccommodating, but manifestly not reducible to any parody of meaning. He is not Marlon Brando as Napoleon in Désirée (1954). We need perhaps to invent a word whose meaning is the exact opposite of charisma, a word that would conjure up a complete, terminal absence of glamour. It would describe a performance, of course. That is what ...”

“... Famous faces. Anyone at home behind them? Let’s begin with Brando, now a famously corpulent body beneath the spoiltangel head. The magnificently instinctual film performer belongs to a past when the man felt able to take acting seriously. By Last Tango in Paris, brooding power had turned to blubbery narcissism, and self-parody, it seemed, had come to stay ...”

“... spirit, but what we take away is not the implied commentary but the picture of a canonised Marlon Brando. With Ignatius we get inward description, bold but risky: the vision of the Spiritual Exercises is ‘optimistic, rooted in notions of magnanimity and fraternity’. Optimistic? Yes, I suppose. Fraternal? I don’t think so. Magnanimous? It ...”

“... except this man on a bike, an ageing white-haired gent imitating a 1950s American icon – think Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Next it’s Freddie’s turn. He is to choose a point in the far distance, focus on it, go for it. Freddie takes off and the camera follows him for a bit. He is going very fast in the opposite direction to the one the Master ...”

“... slim’, as James Jones described Prewitt in the book.) Zinnemann led the stage-actor, Marlon Brando, into screen stardom with The Men (1949): it was about paralysed war veterans – and only an art-house movie. He describes Brando’s ‘method’ and writes, characteristically, of the film: it opened in ...”

“... rooting around in a Monmouth junk shop. This was, unsurprisingly, a hoax, as were claims that Marlon Brando had paid £350,000 for the footage. But the alleged provenance was intriguing. Sullivan invented a psychical researcher called William Doidge, who had, he said, fought with the Scots Guards at the Battle of Mons in August 1914. The angel had ...”

“... Robert Redford. He should have taken lessons in the British accent from the hard-working Marlon Brando. Firmly hooked to the movie, this elaborate Century edition of Out of Africa is packed with illustrations which will appeal to nostalgic movie-weepers but have nothing to do with the text. We are reading about an interesting Kikuyu called ...”

“... so compelling, so remote from the slightly mawkish moments in the first, where that lovable old Marlon Brando collapses to his death while playing with a grandchild in the garden, is the sense of deeper and deeper implication in horror. Godfather III (1990) is a different story altogether, a wandering tale of conspiracy and disaster, a movie which is ...”