April 23, 2012

18 The Men (1950)

***
Country: US
Director: Fred Zinnemann


Marlon Brando's performance as Stanley Kowalski in the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire made him a movie star. So closely identified is Brando with that character that many people believe it was his first screen appearance. But it wasn't. A Streetcar Named Desire was actually the second film he made. A year before making Streetcar, Brando starred in a modest film produced by Stanley Kramer and directed by Fred Zinnemann about the problems of a paraplegic ex-soldier, The Men.

Brando plays Bud Wilocek, a young man who was shot in the back by a sniper in the closing days of the Second World War and is now paralyzed from the waist down. He has been languishing in Veterans Hospitals for four years without making any significant physical or psychological adjustment to his disability. When we first see Bud he is having a nightmare, and it soon becomes clear that he is a depressed and bitter man. Dismayed at Bud's lack of progress, the physician in charge of his treatment, Dr. Brock (Everett Sloane), decides to move him from a private room to a ward in the hope that this will force him to socialize with other patients and bring him out of his lethargy and self-pity. The three other patients in his section of the ward find it difficult to relate to Bud's sullen attitude. One of them, though, a Latino named Angel Lopez, treats him with more patience than the others and manages to reach him. Eventually, following the upbeat Lopez's example of dedication to physical rehabilitation, Bud begins to emerge from his self-imposed isolation and at last to make both physical and psychological progress.

Matters become complicated when Bud's girl friend from before his injury, Ellen (Teresa Wright), seeks him out to try to resume their relationship. For four years he has refused to see her, viewing the future of any relationship as hopeless. But she persists and slowly succeeds in thawing him emotionally, to the point where he agrees to marry her. An hour into the movie, the Bud we now see is a quite different person from the man we met at the beginning. Ellen seems to have motivated him to make a real effort to adjust to his condition and adopt a more hopeful attitude toward the future. After being married in the chapel at the hospital, they go to their new house, the first time Bud has lived away from a hospital since his injury. But things do not go well that first day. Ellen suddenly gets cold feet, and when Bud senses her trepidation he reacts with anger and moves back to the hospital. With disappointment on both sides, it's questionable whether the young couple will ever get back together.

The Men is an early example of a kind of American film that really began with William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives—the postwar film that sought to place a personal story in the context of a social problem and to present that problem realistically and informatively. Before directing feature films, Zinnemann worked for years as a director of documentary shorts, and in The Men that background is evident right from the beginning, as Dr. Brock speaks to a group of women—mothers, wives, and fiancĂ©es—about the nature of paraplegia and its implications for personal relationships. "The word walk must be forgotten," he tells them bluntly. "It no longer exists." It's the kind of explanatory narrative passage Zinnemann had used in the first minutes of The Search (1948) to describe the process of dealing with displaced children after WW II and would use again in the opening of The Nun's Story (1959) to document the way novitiates train to become nuns.

Today we are familiar with films about the kinds of social and medical problems dealt with in The Men, but in its day it must have been seen as an example of a new kind of movie, one that treated such subjects with unaccustomed candor and seriousness. One thing that makes The Men so effective at this is the amount of realistic detail in the picture. Much of it was filmed on location at the Birmingham VA Hospital in Van Nuys, California, and several dozen actual patients of the paraplegic ward at the hospital appear in the film. Fred Zinnemann and the writer, Carl Foreman, did a great deal of research in preparation for the picture, and that attention to realism shows.

Marlon Brando did equally meticulous preparation for his role as Bud. For a month before filming began, Brando lived as a patient at Birmingham VA Hospital. For the first three weeks he was at the hospital, the other patients didn't know he was an actor. He lived as a paraplegic, experiencing and absorbing as much as he could. He even learned to use a wheelchair expertly, as you can tell when you see him rocketing down the hallway of the hospital and deftly maneuvering around obstacles or playing wheelchair basketball with real paraplegics. To say that Brando was researching his role seems too mild a way to describe the lengths he went to for authenticity.

Marlon Brando on the set of The Men

Brando is probably the film actor admired by fellow film actors above all others. Time and again I've heard actors say how affected they were by him and how he inspired them in their craft. They often say how real he seems on screen. Yet Brando has never struck me as a realistic actor. Despite the Method's fundamental tenet of actors reaching deep inside to find a connection between themselves and the character they're playing, I've generally found Brando the actor to be highly mannered. Sometimes this can be hugely effective, as with his flamboyant, sinister/comical Stanley Kowalski. One exception to the high level of artifice found in so many Brando performances is his Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, which seems on the whole a very honest job of acting. His Bud in The Men is another performance I would call honest.

I suspect that Brando must have burned out on screen acting within a few years. Perhaps this is why his Bud in The Men seems so fresh. There's a very unaffected quality to Bud not found in most of the characters he played later. In those later performances, Brando sometimes strains so hard to locate the uniqueness of the character that he comes perilously close to caricature. In Bud, though, he creates a character who cannot be reduced to a set of mannerisms, a complex young man—and Brando does seem very young, at times almost boyish—who embodies the opposing qualities of anger and sensitivity. Brando makes us believe that these are not contradictory traits, but that they coexist innately in Bud. It's an impressively natural performance, one without the sense of contrivance of his later work. Brando's presence alone makes The Men worth watching, not just for its historical interest as his first appearance on screen, but also for the quality and openness of his acting.

Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is not always as consistent as Brando. In The Men we can witness a whole range of acting styles. As fellow patients, Richard Erdman and Jack Webb (yes, Sgt. Joe Friday himself) give controlled performances, as does Teresa Wright, who conveys with great subtlety the initial determination and later irresolution of Ellen. As Dr. Brock, though, Everett Sloane is prone to overacting and speechifying. Interestingly, in a scene late in the film between him and Brando, when Bud is venting his full anger to Dr. Brock, Sloane holds back to let Brando dominate the scene and in his restraint does his best acting in the film.

The non-professional actors in the film also show varying degrees of ability. Arthur Jurado, the real-life paraplegic who plays Angel (apparently he died not long after making the film) is quite affecting and natural. Some of the other non-professionals portraying patients, however, seem amateurishly overemphatic. This is especially obvious in a scene where a group of these men meet to determine how to deal with an instance of Bud's serious misbehavior. Besides the inconsistency of the acting, my chief complaint about the film is the heavy-handed music score by Dimitri Tiomkin. The low-key style of the film is not well served by Tiomkin's overbearing and seemingly incessant music.

If the idea of a movie about war injury no longer seems as novel as it must have in 1950, the subject itself is one that has just as much relevance today as it did then. In the film Bud received his injury in the closing days of the Second World War. But just a month before The Men was released, the Korean War began. Since then we have had Vietnam, the Gulf War of the early 90s, the Serbian conflict of the late 90s, and now Iraq/Afghanistan. If today the plight of soldiers suffering war injuries—both physical and psychological—has become a subject films tackle routinely, we can thank movies like The Men for making this so.

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This post is part of the LAMB Acting School 101 on Marlon Brando. Click here for more posts on Brando.

18 comments:

  1. I agree with your comment that Brando actually could be a mannered, 'non-realist' actor but that he seems fresh and sincere in this film. No doubt much of the movie's success stems from his commitment to his role and how well he adapts to the medium - his face/eyes, voice, the use of small gestures, convey as much as how he uses his wheelchair. I also like how the film is open-ended at its conclusion as to what will happen with Brando & Wright's relationship; Kramer & Zinneman seem to be making an honest attempt to avoid fake uplift.

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    1. GOM, as you can tell from my post, I prefer Brando's early film performances. In an interview Fred Zinnemann was asked about how difficult it was for Brando to adapt his stage acting style for "The Men" and he said, "It was not easy for Brando. On the other hand, once he got the knack he was tremendous." I wonder if the physical and emotional confinement of Bud helped Brando tone down his style. As you say, he is really effective in those small details that come through so clearly in film, especially in the close shots, which is where many inexperienced film actors show their insecurity by over-projecting.

      Zinnemann is one of those directors looked down on by auteurist critics for not having a sufficiently disctinctive style (like William Wyler and Geo. Stevens). But I'm not so sure this is necessarily a bad thing, considering the level of craftsmanship of those directors, their success at getting good performances from their casts, and their sincere dedication to bringing out the best in the scripts they were working from.

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  2. I agree with you that Brando's finest performances are his early ones. "Honest" is a perfect description. I would add that they're also controlled. Perhaps, n-nonsense directors such as Zinnemann and Kazan had something to do with that.

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    1. Rick, from what I've read about Brando, it seems he got tired of acting after a few years, that he just didn't enjoy it any longer. In later performances I often get the impression that he's desperate to recapture the inspiration he felt at first, and that makes him seem strained. One of the few later performances where I sense he was actually enjoying himself is in "Teahouse of the August Moon," the least typical Brando performance I've seen and the most unexpected Brando vehicle I've seen. Maybe so much hype and acclaim so early in his career made him feel he was competing with himself. His obviously large ego probably didn't help his work either.

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  3. What a performance to start off your film career. I was really amazed by thie picture--primarily the story itself, but both Brando and Wright are truly compelling in it. I agree that some Brando roles turn out to be overly-mannerized, but when they aren't they are usually spectacular to behold.

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    1. Kim, I'm glad you brought up Teresa Wright. She was THE ingenue of the 1940s, and she brings some of that innocent sweetness to Ellen. But she also has strength and determination too, and that brings an edge of greater maturity than she had in her earlier, more girlish roles. At the time she was a much better-known actor than Brando and more familiar to audiences (and an Oscar winner too for "Mrs. Miniver"). She was a more traditional actress but seemed to have good rapport, at least on screen, with Brando and his "new" style of acting. Their contrasting acting styles seem right for their characters, the same as Brando's and Vivien Leigh's do in "A Streetcar Named Desire."

      I think Brando's later performances that are most successful are ones like Don Corleone in "The Godfather," which I think of as a character part, like stars of the studio era used to play when they reached middle age. His level of artifice--the heavy makeup, assumed voice, physical mannerisms--works for me in this kind of role and in smaller doses than in movies built around him. But for all the hype about "the Method," is this really that different from what someone like Paul Muni was doing in the 30s?

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  4. Great review! I completely agree with you about Brando's acting.

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    1. Silverscreenings, thank you. One thing that's undeniable is that for better or worse, Brando was the most influential American actor of the 1950s and almost single-handedly responsible for the dominance of Method acting in both theater and film.

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  5. "But for all the hype about "the Method," is this really that different from what someone like Paul Muni was doing in the 30s?"

    An interesting thought. I really enjoyed this review. You've made some excellent observations. It's been some years since I've seen "The Men" but I can recall being struck by the different acting styles you mentioned, and especially by the notion that though this was a post-WWII story, it seemed lost in time -- maybe steamrolled over by the Korean War. Brando's disabled veteran seems sadly, suddenly, obsolete.

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    1. Jacqueline, an interesting observation about Brando's character here seeming, or maybe feeling, obsolete. This is something we seem to hear a lot about these days--Vietnam and even Middle East vets feeling like their sacrifices have been forgotten because they're no longer the latest news story.

      Another thing your comment made me think was that maybe another reason Brando's "new" acting style works in this picture is that it underscores his isolation. One thing Method acting was especially good at was encouraging actors to externalize their inner torments, although from what I read this didn't have the best psychological effect on some, like Montgomery Clift and Marilyn Monroe.

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  6. R.D.,
    I was so glad to see you had review The Men as I had read about Brando's lengthy research for the role as he lived with an aunt I believe. I'm reminded of Born on the Fourth of July in a way here although it was a lot more violent and graphic even compared to today's standards. Having Arthur Jurado in the film makes it even more appealing to me.

    Times photo series is where I read all of the info and viewed some great behind the scenes photos of this film.
    If you haven't seen them I hope you'll check them out.

    I've never seen this film aired. I'd love to see it if I
    can find it somewhere.

    A very interesting read.
    Page

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    1. Page, thanks for your comment. "The Men" is out on DVD. I don't know if it's still in print. I got my copy from the library. You can get it from Netflix. I've never noticed it being shown on TCM. Don't know why.

      I did take a look at the magazine photos. That's where the picture of Brando on the set which I used in the post came from. Brando did live with his aunt in Eagle Rock, a suburb of L.A. near Pasadena, while making the film. "Born on the Fourth of July" is one of the few Oliver Stone or Tom Cruise movies I like. It has--not surprising given Stone's involvement!--a more activist slant on the same subject. "The Men" sticks with the strictly personal issues.

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  7. Definitely interested now in seeing Brando's first performance! Thanks for the recommendation!

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    1. Kristen, after reading your thoughts on Brando in "A Streetcar Named Desire," I think you'll find him quite a contrast here. In "The Men" he's troubled but sweet--Dr. Jeckyll to his Mr. Hyde in "Streetcar"!

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  8. "The Men is an early example of a kind of American film that really began with William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives—the postwar film that sought to place a personal story in the context of a social problem and to present that problem realistically and informatively."

    Indeed R.D. My apologies for the late appearance, but this week has been brutally demanding on this end. Things will be normal in a few more days. I quite agree that Brando is probably the most influential and respected actor from his peers and that his studied approach has informed his most renowned roles. He was extraordinary in this film, one that should have earned the much underrated and maligned Stanley Kramer higher grades. True too that the film both recalls THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES and that in a rare instance the great Dmitri Tiomkin did not deliver the goods with the score. But this is a worthy film that has received the master-class treatment here at THE MOVIE PROJECTOR.

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    1. Sam, your comments are always welcome at any point. Both Fred Zinnemann and Stanley Kramer acknowledged that they tended to make movies about social issues. In the late 40s and early 50s that was a risky thing to do, with people like Louis B. Mayer believing only escapist movies would make money, and the politics of liberal filmmakers like Zinnemann and Kramer making them prone to suspicion by the anti-Communists in Hollywood and Washington.

      It's true that this approach sometimes resulted in preachy movies that haven't aged well. "The Men," by framing the issues firmly within the personal story and with Brando making Bud such a compelling and sympathetic person, has escaped this fate. Brando in particular only looks better in this film after all these years. The control of what you call his "extraordinary" performance may come as a surprise to those who know him only from his later, often excessive work.

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  9. R.D.,
    Sorry, I am late coming here and even more so after reading your excellent essay. Absolutely one of Brando’s greatest performances, he really gets to the soul of this guy. The film itself reminds me a bit of the 1978 film COMING HOME where Hal Ashby also used real life paraplegics (also Vietnam Vets). Like THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, the film deals with the returning Vet and his girlfriend/wife. Ashby's film goes in further dealing with the sexual relations. tInteresting enough Zinnemann made three films in short order dealing with the aftermath of the war, this film, THE SEARCH, which you mentioned, and the more melodramatic noirish ACT OF VIOLENCE.

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    1. John, "The Men" barely touches on the sexual problems of paraplegics. In that early scene when the doctor is talking to the wives/fiancees he mentions that paraplegics can sometimes have children depending on the individual case. This was clearly an allusion to sexual relations and I've read that it caused problems with censors in Britain, who didn't approve of the subject being approached even in such a roundabout way.

      When Ellen's parents object strongly to the marriage (they're conspicuously absent at the wedding), they finally admit that it's really the possibility of never having grandchildren that has soured them on the engagement. It's also impossible not to wonder how much the anxiety about sexual relations has to do with the disastrous first day when Bud and Ellen break up.

      Anyway, thanks for your comment, and I think that those familiar only with Brando's later work will find his acting here surprising. He's still recognizably Brando, but in a refreshingly unaffected way.

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