Name: How Marlon Brando Changed Acting
Uploaded: 2025-11-17T17:19:02.000Z
Duration: 9 min 58 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

Participle clauses

Brando glances to the left here, accessing the memory.

And here he changes movie acting forever.

He's checking to see something under the table, adjusting his chair.

It's hard to overstate how revolutionary a choice like this was in 1954.

Actors just didn't get distracted in this way.

Trained in theater theatrical techniques, they hit their spots, articulated their lines and performed instantly legible emotions for the audience.

They didn't pause a conversation to look under the table, turning their head away from the microphone in the process.

And they certainly didn't speak while chewing food.

He was as loose in enunciation as he was in physicalization, sometimes to the point of unintelligibility.

For the most part, he stayed on the right side of that line.

But the risk was worth it because in real life, we don't often articulate with the clarity of a stage actor.

We stutter and mumble, especially when a conversation veers into a place that makes us uncomfortable.

Come to think of it, another thing we do when uncomfortable is fidget and instinctively turn away.

Maybe there was something more to that moment of seeming distraction from before.

When I was a kid, my old man got bumped off and never mind how, with a shrug, a head tilt and a look down.

Brando as Terry Molloy dismisses or tries to dismiss the murder of his father.

And he stuck Charlie and me in a dump they call a children's home.

Everything about the awful experience in that foster home is evoked by that silence and that look.

And what you're about to see is another attempt to dismiss the memory, to push it back under.

But this time it's gonna more like a flinch of disgust, nausea, even shame.

In my book, it's one of the great gestures of acting history.

Keep in mind that Terry didn't have to mention these things.

He's choosing to bring up the two most harrowing events in his life.

He wants to communicate his pain to Edie because he's never had the chance to before and because Edie is in her own pain and he's trying to connect with her.

In the opening of the movie, her brother is Killed by gangsters.

Gangsters that Terry Malloy associates with, albeit reluctantly.

Terry was unwittingly the one that lured Edie's brother to her death.

He feels guilt about this just as he feels a deep sadness about his memories.

He, of course, built a hard exterior to survive.

But Brando's great gift is in the ways he lets us catch glimpses of the desperate sensitivity beneath.

And I fought in the club smokers and pedal papers and Johnny Friendly bought a piece of me.

And you can see that moment where Terry realizes the deeper connotation of a piece of him being owned by another man.

I was going pretty good there for a while.

When his eyes betray his words, his voice says, what do you really care?

Shouldn't everybody care about everybody else?

I mean, isn't everybody a part of everybody else?

With the slightest relaxing of the eyebrows the scoffing challenge becomes a sincere question.

He wants her to believe that we're all connected, that empathy is possible.

He can feel, for a moment the hard shell softening.

But then the drinks come and snap him out of it.

And Brando's movements become more precise and harsh.

Listen, don't look at me when you say that.

It wasn't my fault what happened to Joey.

Well, everybody's putting a needle on me.

I didn't like the way he was looking at me.

Brando is cycling through so many emotions here, each with its own subtext.

It wasn't my fault what happened to Joey to defiant.

Edie at this point doesn't know what role he played in her brother's death.

You can sense that he wants to apologize but not be blamed.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How Marlon Brando Changed Acting

articulate

distraction

access

vulnerability