Marlon Brando;
The famous "godfather".
How many people specifically looked for "Dock Storm" to see, just because of him.
This is Marlon Brando's career breakthrough "StreetCar of Desire" and "Zapata Biography" that won the Cannes Film Emperor, and continued to work with director Ilya Kazan.
Ilya Kazan, a name that only old fans can remember today.
Without him, Marlon Brando's career trajectory could have been completely different, and he might have become a late bloomer, rather than becoming a Hollywood superstar in his inception.
At that time, Marlon Brando was not only once the royal male protagonist of Ilya Kazan, but he also participated in the "Actor's Studio" founded by Ilya Kazan to study acting, which is likely to be a stepping stone for his acting skills from practice to perfection.
Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, the two guys who later starred together in The Godfather 2, were also trainees of the Actors Studio.
By the time of Piers, Marlon Brando's performance wouldn't disappoint.
The story focuses on the docks of New York Harbor in the United States, telling the story of a retired boxer named Terry, from joining the gang, becoming an accomplice to the killing, to struggling with his conscience, and finally deciding to make an enemy of the gang.
Terry has a very large mental transformation process, which requires the actor to interpret the before and after changes in the role.
Playing Terry, Marlon Brando is a stunned boy as soon as he appears, and his eyes always show a sense of cynicism;
Meeting the heroine, Edie, is an important twist.
For Edie, Terry had two feelings.
One is the guilt of the death of Edie's brother Charlie;
The other is the standard slim lady, the gentleman is good, Marlon Brando by the way to interpret what is called the sister textbook.
Importantly, as the plot progresses, his expression changes visible to the naked eye.
Terry went from a young man who lay flat early to a man who was obsessed with love and knew how to think about right and wrong.
Perhaps trying to replicate "The StreetCar of Desire", marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh's two performance styles collided with miracles, and Ilya Kazan also chose a more expressionist heroine this time.
Eva Mary Centrum, whose acting career began on Broadway, her stage performance habits continued into films, so in "Docks", shortly after her transformation into film, her performance had an exaggerated performance of expressionism.
The Marlon Brando method pays more attention to real nature, so in "Dock Storm", you can also see the collision and fusion of the two performance styles.
In the second half, Terry emerges from her confusion and eventually transforms into a fierce fighter.
Marlon Brando's expression naturally transitioned to a state of boldness and fearlessness.
If he's a buddy in the front who can go up and joke at will, then he's an angry bull in the back that you would never dare to mess with.
It's hard for the audience to perceive how he's changed, and that's where the success of his performance comes in.
The first Oscar winner, that's how he got it.
Excellent performance, if there is no good script is also a waste.
"Docks" is textbook for the arc of the character of the protagonist Terry.
Facilitating role shifts is multifaceted.
There is love, there is affection, and there is a conscience hidden in the heart of the character;
There are three main aspects, each represented by three roles.
Love is Edie;
Affection is Terry's gangster brother, and the scene in which the two talk in the car is also a classic, not only in terms of performance, but also in terms of content explaining the painful past of the brothers, which makes it easier for both characters to win the sympathy of the audience.
It can be said that the performance of brotherhood is more moving than the love of the male and female protagonists.
So don't mistake it for a gangster romance.
Conscience is Father Barry.
The priest became a key player in the struggle between the workers and the capitalists, because Christianity had a certain influence in the United States, so his intervention became an important force for the workers to rebel against the gangsters and the capitalists.
The three aspects can be divided into three story lines;
Love is the love of the male and female protagonists;
The upbringing of a kinship brother in the gang;
Conscience is the main plot line in which Barry and Edie track down the truth about Charlie's death.
The three story lines intersperse traffic with each other, driving the advancement of the plot and Terry's growth.
Everything is so solid that the climax is extremely explosive.
Sure enough, the best screenplay did not run.
The ideological output of "Docks" is more prominent, which can be said to be a bit of a gangster version of "Modern Times".
This makes the villain somewhat facialized, and it has become one of the controversial points of film criticism.
Ilya Kazan's desire to express so much of an indictment of capitalism must be related to the "Hollywood political blacklist incident" in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
At that time, many "leftist filmmakers", including Chaplin, were expelled from Hollywood.
Unable to withstand the pressure, he chose to give up his peers in order to protect himself.
This unaffected his career, but he was saddled with the infamy of being a traitor.
Looking back on "The Docks" years later, it is not only marlon Brando and the theme of angry capitalists that are exciting.
There are also actors who later starred in other classics.
Eva Mary Sente, who was photographed by Hitchcock in the late 1950s, starred in North by Northwest;
Since this commercial production is the template for the "007" series, she can also be called the prototype of "Bang Girl".
Lee Cobb, who plays the main villain Johnny, did not take long to play "Twelve Angry Men", also playing a fierce role that roars at every turn and creates a sense of threat to the protagonist.
I believe that more people have an impression of him through "Twelve Angry Men".
For audiences who are not so familiar with hollywood history, will it feel like Qin Qiong is about to see the "godfather" Marlon Brando playing against these actors?
Oh, and that's the 1955 Oscar for Best Picture.
Even if you are not a fan of Marlon Brando, you can enjoy it and experience the real art of cinema.