Why Brando stopped cared about his acting quality?

It's one of those things that isn't easy to pinpoint or to categorize either. For example he maybe didn't care about his performance in The Godfather as far as we know (didn't know his lines really, read off of cue cards) but he cared very much when he filmed The Ugly American - what's the better performance? We can't always see when an actor cares or not.

In general Brando felt acting was a somewhat silly thing for a man to do for a living - you didn't create anything, you "pretended" - it's the same argument Nicholson expresses in that interview where he says being an actor that wasn't supposed to be on your list of things to do for a living really. But that's the appeal - you get to pretend for a living, how awesome is that! - except when you're not pretending (ie Brando in Last Tango) - then, I guess it can be "how awful is that?"

Montgomery Clift died.

I was going to say the exact same thing.

The one true reason...

XFILES25 RESURRECTED !!!

It's such a tricky thing - was he bored all through the 60s and then all of a sudden not bored for The Godfather and then bored again and not until Apocalypse Now.............does his being bored matter anyway etc.

Is a bored Marlon Brando better than a deeply committed William Holden or someone like that. The truth is we just never know or understand actors and their motivations and what goes into what we see.

It's sorta like when people say "they just made that movie (or he just took the part for the money)" - it's like yeah, so what, you think the others were made just for the Art of it?   

I think that's a complicated issue and we, from the outside, just never know. Hell, I think even Brando or any other actor/artist ever quite understands what drives them, or not.

It would be easier if we could look at it and say: "He was totally into this or that project and his work turned out great!"

But then you have things like The Godfather.

It kind of reminds me of the way we/the public/the press look at Pacino/De Niro nowadays. The whole discussion about what makes/doesn't make them great performers nowadays is just so simple minded. Even in film criticism, which really should know better.

It's just not that simple to grasp what makes a great performance or what drives an actor/actress to certain artistic heights and what doesn't.

I regularly get angry reading that, for example, Pacino is sleepwalking through this or that and that he hasn't really cared about giving a great performance. I mean you can (or should) get angry at some choices those two guys made in recent years and you can criticize the work they delivered, but that whole "they don't care anymore" bullshit you hear all the time, I just don't buy it.

There are certainly cases when you could justify such an assessment, but overall, this assumption gets thrown around way too often and it's just lazy criticism. For example, I truly believe Pacino was as much into playing Paterno or doing The Humbling as he was when he did Serpico or Dog Day.

Brando seemed to be bored and disgusted by the whole movie industry by the late 60s, so was this an end to him being a special actor? Of course not. He still delivered. And at other times he didn't. As I said, it's just pretty impossible to really grasp what's going on inside someone and what the consequences are for the level of work they are able to do.

DePalma is absolutely right. (And that's coming from a director who never truly got the critical attention he deserved, especially in contrast to his peers.)

I mean, it's just ridiculous if you look how fast the perception of certain films/performances changes over time. Just look at what is championed at the Oscars. Or even within the whole blogosphere or even by serious critics, debating THE great performances of the year. If you would buy into it, that whole hype around what's soooo great at the moment, you would be confronted with a Brando-in-Tango or a Hoffman-in-Straight Time every few weeks. And then, after a certain time, everybody cools down.

It has always been that way, but I think nowadays the turnaround comes faster and faster. And so does the hyperbole.

Totally agree with you regarding Pacino. It came to my mind that it's actually much easier for actors, even legendary ones, to get noticed and praised and rewarded if they don't carry with them such a strong impression within movie history. And that's certainly the case with Pacino (and De Niro).

Somehow, they've become victims of their own success. Everybody has a clear image of what a great Pacino performance has to look like. You know, the swagger and all that, or going further back, the cold menace of Michael Corleone. And no matter what he ACTUALLY delivers, it is pretty much always measured against our IDEA of Pacino. Even critics do that. They regularly ignore the different colors he has brought to his characters over the years, as he has in Donnie Brasco for example.

Great actors like Duvall don't have that problem, everybody already believing they know what they are getting, even before anyone has seen anything of the actual work. And even afterwards. The general public and the critics just don't have that strong a conception of how a great Duvall performance has to look like. Without disparaging their work, Bruce Dern and others seem to have it much easier to get the praise they deserve these days.

Of course, of the many things Brando created, many of which are mostly false like "Naturalism = better acting" etc. the idea that when all actors care it is better than when they don't ........it's more complicated than that.

For example Brando's specific problem to me wasn't that he didn't care - that's too general as to be meaningless to him, it was rather when he felt he had something to say and he didn't have that much he wanted to say after a certain point. His George Lincoln Rockwell in Roots II and his Ian McKenzie in A Dry White Season are two of his best later turns - and are never discussed at all - he clearly felt only he could convey something about these two, wildly disparate men.

There is a thread on this board about Christopher Reeve dissing Brando (see the "Acting" board) and his lack of caring that is one of the grossest things I've ever read on here, with all due respect to Reeve (RIP) - he didn't get it. Brando sometimes could care about the productions and be great, he could not care at all about them and still be great, but when he felt he had something to truly say, not merely to do his job "well".......that was when he transcends the medium and turns what is usually just a craft into a genuine Art.

just as a general rule of thumb, everyone should watch Listen to Me Marlon. I know he addresses that period in his life where he "stopped caring" (not a good description, pacinoyes covered why) and gives you an insight into what he was thinking because the whole thing to my memory is in his own words. One of the very best profile docs out there.