Welcome back for Day 4 of our Marlon Brando spotlight series! Today we’ll be talking about one of my favorite movies, the film that earned Brando his first Oscar win: Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954). I waxed on about the merits of A Streetcar Named Desire in Day 1 (another Kazan/Brando pairing–clearly they knew how to complement each other’s strengths) and Waterfront is just as good, albeit for different reasons. In a role completely different from the hot-headed Stanley Kowalski, Brando’s Terry Malloy is quiet, introspective, and only fights when he’s pushed to his limits. Malloy is a former boxer, and was largely “sponsored” in his short career by the shady dealings of …
