Marlon Brando Screen Tests
A sexy tryout for Rebel Without a Cause
In 1947 Marlon Brando was a 23-year-old Broadway actor on the verge of becoming a legend. By December of that year he would appear as the boorish, violent and twisted Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire, electrifying Broadway audiences. Then he played Stanley onscreen, in director Elia Kazan’s 1951 movie version, transforming himself into a sexually charged icon of American culture. He would eventually win two Oscars, for On the Waterfront in 1954 and The Godfather in 1972, and have a career so filled with indelible moments, from The Wild One to Last Tango in Paris, that it pretty much defines the phrase “larger than life.”
But wait: before Brando did Streetcar in 1947, he took a screen test for a movie project that wouldn’t actually be filmed for another eight years—Rebel Without a Cause. And that is what we are seeing in this video—Brando the virtual unknown, a young actor with a shy voice yet an unabashed, keenly emotional temperament, strikingly handsome in a unique and idiosyncratic way. His mood flashes in the Rebel screen test are a sneak peak at the Stanislavskian technique and relentless originality that would inspire his peers and actors in generations to come, notably James Dean, who, ironically enough, would get the lead in Nicholas Ray’s 1955 movie version of Rebel Without a Cause and become an instant Method icon himself in Brando’s mold.
Even better: if you skip through this video to 3:50, when the screen test shifts to a direct interview with Brando in a suit and tie, you’ll see another side to this remarkable young man. He’s flirtatious yet vaguely alienated from a process that so easily objectifies him. While the acting exercise of the screen test foreshadows the movie star heights he would eventually scale, this interview affords a view of his private world, one that would be punctuated in the years to come by tragedy and depression. Catch it while you can.
