Brando was an insane person. His sexual magnetism enabled him to break out from a stifling NY upbringing constrained by Christian scientists and a drunkard for a mother.
Sudden fame and fortune dazzled him in Hollywood but he got a taste of another world filming alongside dirt-poor Mexicans in their quest for freedom in ‘Viva Zapata’
He was yoked back to La La Land to make some Technicolor rubbish called ‘The Egyptian’ but (according to Wiki) suffered “mental strain” and walked out a week before filming was to start. He was then blackmailed to appear in another good-looking epic of Napoleonic rubbish co-starring the most fraudulent woman in Hollywood named ‘Merle Oberon’.
He was obviously sick of the deceit and sought out a different kind of civilisation in Japan and, as I say, went through a big mental-upheaval spending time amongst those people on whom his fellow-Americans had recently dropped two atomic bombs.
He made two Japanese movies. In one of them he suppressed his muscular physique, shrunk his body, and used make up to mimic the small, fey, roguish role Sakini in "The Treehouse of the August Moon". (It is pure ‘Yellowface’ which somehow seems to have escaped notice of the idiot-Millennials who shriek over Mickey Rooney’s Yunioshi).
Brando's mental instability and obsessions simmered over relations between native people and colonizers. It erupted again filming in Tahiti in 1962 in another story about the clash between a native culture and an imperialist one in 'Mutiny on the Bounty'.
He subverted his role by turning the English Fletcher Christian into an effeminate fop. He became uncontrollable to the man who was supposed to be in control, Sir Carol Reed.
Sir Carol Reed was a perfectly capable and competent film director but he may just have had a chip on his shoulder in that ten years previously made another film about another clash between a native culture and an imperialist one. This film called ‘Outcast of the Islands’ starring Trevor Howard suffered with faulty black and white location photography in Malaya. Now Reed had a lavish budget, excellent camera but a star who went nuts, spent his time with the Tahitian women and eventually sacked him as director.
A year later Brando starred in the movie ‘The Ugly American’ and afterwards took roles portraying Mexicans, Indians etc and appearing in other films championing native peoples against ‘the colonisers’ and his sexual partners included Indians, Mexicans, Polynesians, Chinese, Puerto Ricans and Japanese.
His career dribbled away until his death.
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