Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work by Susan L. Mizruchi

Author:Susan L. Mizruchi [Mizruchi, Susan L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

THE DON

On January 23, 1970, Mario Puzo sent Brando a copy of his bestselling novel with a note urging that he pursue the lead in the film version: “I think you’re the only actor who can play the Godfather with that quiet force and irony the part requires. I hope you’ll read the book and like it well enough to use whatever power you can to get the role. . . . I really think you’d be tremendous. Needless to say I’ve been an admirer of your art.”22 Brando was not convinced he could play an Italian Mafia head, and he thanked Puzo without reading the book. But Puzo persisted, sending the actor another copy of the book a few months later, along with the screenplay he had adapted from it. Brando read both and decided that he wanted the role.

Hollywood lore has several versions of the famed recording made of Brando’s test for studio heads. According to those who were there, director Francis Ford Coppola and producer Al Ruddy arrived at Brando’s Mulholland Drive home with camera equipment on a December morning in 1970. When he got up, Brando took out the makeup case he had drawn on for years, blackening his hair, adding a thin mustache, and stuffing Kleenex in his cheeks for jowls. Wordlessly, with an occasional grimace, a cup of espresso in hand, he became the Don.

Henceforth Brando relied on his understanding of the Don and his instincts. “I threw out a lot of what was in the script and created the role as I thought it should be,” he said, referring to his reliance on the novel over the screenplay Puzo had adapted with Coppola. “The part of Don Corleone lent itself perfectly to underplaying. Rather than portraying him as a big shot, I thought it would be more effective to play him as a modest quiet man, the way he was in the book.” This would be a new take on the gangster: “Because he had so much power and unquestioned authority, I thought it would be an interesting contrast to play him as a gentleman. I saw him as a man of substance, tradition, dignity, refinement . . . who just happened to live in a violent world and who had to protect himself and his family in this environment.”23 Brando’s respect for the character never clouded his perception of the Don’s capacity for ruthlessness. It was Brando’s choice to give him a raspy, “high voice” that came “through the nose”—“a nose broken early in youth,” the actor explained in his notes on the script.24

Brando’s characterization provides a lesson in dominance. The Godfather, introduced listening to a supplicant’s request, is distinguished gradually from the enveloping darkness. A similar emergence would come in Apocalypse Now. Only the Don’s hand moves, supporting his chin, a slight wave summoning a drink for the weeping undertaker, Amerigo Bonasera. Brando understood that in a world as perilous as The Godfather’s, a boss’s slightest gesture was consequential. When he

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