The Resonance of Brando’s Voice

“Remember, it wasn’t a documentary about Mafia chief Vito Genovese. It was Marlon Brando with Kleenex in his mouth.”
Francis Ford Coppola, Playboy (1975)

When Marlon Brando voiced Stanley Kowalski’s anguished cry for Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire, the register of American male acting was transformed by a new and challenging naturalism. Michel Chion has argued that the “mass audience truly became aware of the notion of the constructed voice with Marlon Brando’s 1971 role in The Godfather. Don Corleone’s husky, intimate voice makes the listener conscious of its presence and its timbre, as well as its fabricated quality” (142). Indeed, the story of Brando stuffing Kleenex in his cheeks to create the Godfather’s distinctively guttural sound remains well known forty years later. My essay addresses this apparent contradiction: that Brando’s voice both exemplifies naturalism and foregrounds its own construction. This contradiction replays the tensions that theories of acting have long sought to understand and control: that the actor’s capacity to express powerful emotion threatens (or promises) to overwhelm sanity and social boundaries, and yet, in the famous terms of Diderot’s paradox, the actor should not feel the emotion he or she performs.[1] From the moment of his stage debut in Streetcar, Marlon Brando’s association with Method acting made him the focus of popular and scholarly debate about the romantic aspirations of acting to be natural, spontaneous, and authentic in light of the audience’s heightened awareness of the technique by which, in Stanislavski’s phrase, the actor “lives the part” (15).  James Naremore, Virginia Wright Wexman, and Steve Cohan have written with deep insight about the significance of Brando’s image and performance style as inherently paradoxical; in Cohan’s words, “Brando’s celebrated naturalness signified the theatricality of his acting” (244).
 

In this essay, I want to reconsider the tension between naturalism and mediation by analyzing the relation of the actor’s voice, using Brando as the exemplary case, to the mediating technologies of film. This project illustrates many valuable points of connection between voice studies and recent work on film acting, key among them questions of embodiment and the construction of a stable self that sustain the idea of naturalism. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and The Godfather (1972) define two key moments in Brando’s career: his emergence as a star, and his comeback from a decade of films deemed commercial and critical failures. They also feature two of the most famous vocal performances in Hollywood history and frame a period of dramatic change in studio filmmaking, including the transformation of cinema sound. Why does Brando’s voice, especially in these two films, continue to resonate, ubiquitously quoted in popular culture and cited in histories of postwar American society? Because, I will argue, Brando performs embodiment to a discomforting degree without denying the technological mediation that structures not only film, but also the postwar conception of reality.
 
The insights of voice studies are essential to a full understanding of this achievement. Recent theorists of the voice identify key assumptions of Western thought that have, in Adriana Cavarero’s words, “render[ed] the voice insignificant” (8). These include a broad privileging of the visual over the aural and language over speech. Understanding of the elusive material voice is further eclipsed by powerful conceptions of voice as metaphor through which it becomes abstract and disembodied; narrative voice is one such metaphor significant to my argument. Film acting is also obscured by privileging language, disembodiment, and the visual. Acting in film is considered harder to recognize than acting on stage because it lacks the sustained naturalizing presence of the body and is shaped by presumably unnatural technologies of recording that are further manipulated into the cinematic text. The commonsense idea that stage performances are embodied and those on film are not obscures the ways embodiment can be the subject of performance in both mediums.
 
Focusing on the voice allows us to ask a different set of questions, one that is rooted in a fleeting materiality rather than the constant presence of the body, while still engaging sensory experience and affect. The actor’s voice has a particular and underappreciated history in the cinema, aspects of which I want to consider in this essay. This history shifts rather than escapes the question of naturalism, which is inherent to most forms of acting whether on stage or screen. As Joseph Roach notes in the introduction to The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting, “each age prides itself on being able to view theatrical exhibits of human feeling that are more realistic and more natural than those of the previous age” (15). If the concept of nature appeals to a transcendent standard of measure, its significance in relation to the body, acting, technology, or filmic texts lies in its historical contingencies.
 
My essay begins with a consideration of the voice in classical Hollywood cinema as both a set of historically defined practices and a critical paradigm in film scholarship. If the conventions of classical Hollywood style form the immediate context for Brando’s revolt, critical revisions of the paradigm defining classical Hollywood cinema by Chion, James Lastra, and Miriam Hansen turn on the question of the voice and have implications for the understanding of naturalism. I then offer detailed readings of Brando’s most famous performative moments: the cry for Stella in Streetcar and the opening scene of The Godfather. Brando’s performance of Stanley’s cry reveals two apparently opposed conceptions of naturalism: a naïve one in which an authenticating nature exists outside the filmic construction of the scene, and an ironic one as the embodiment of the complex affective sensory experience of the technologically mediated postwar world. In The Godfather, this Janus-faced idea of naturalism is dramatized in the depth and texture of the mise-en-scène, which is shaped by innovations in the layering of ambient sound and an ostentatious display of the camera’s presence. The opening scene is shaped to Brando’s voice, not the Godfather’s words, reversing the logic of classical Hollywood style in fundamental ways. Within a shifting of the relation of voice and image, Brando preforms a larger pattern of change within Hollywood filmmaking and modernity.

The Voice in Classical Hollywood Cinema

Traditional histories of cinema presume a natural evolution in which sound was added to the filmic image and voices synchronized to the faces of stars as technological developments enabled increasing realistic representations.[2] Critical focus on sound and voice in the cinema dating to the 1980s complicates this narrative.[3] Chion and Lastra challenge the primacy of the visual and critical conventions of synchronization that subjugate sound to image and voice to body. Lip-synch, the process of matching voice to the image of moving lips, may be, as Lastra contends, “only one, rather banal, possibility” (94) of the synchronization of sound and image, but it is also one of the most powerful signs of how deeply naturalism, which takes the sensory perception of the human body as reality’s measure, conditions the idea of cinema.
 
In the decades between the introduction of the motion picture and the establishment of classical Hollywood style, a variety of recording technologies extended, enhanced, and threatened human sense-perceptions, even as a traditional understanding of the senses and sensory experience shaped recording devices. Early in Sound Technology and the American Cinema, Lastra poses an interesting question: “Why did audio engineers of the 1920s inevitably assume that sound recording should always literally mimic the sensory experience of an imaginary body in real space?” (8). Human perception serves as the naturalized orientation point in the development of cinema, which may explain at least in part why appeals to naturalism in film are repeatedly debunked and resurrected. The individualizing gesture of the “imaginary body in real space” reflects the most basic assumptions of realism: the autonomy of the individual, the reliability of perception, and the stability of material reality.  Since its emergence in the mid-1890s, cinema “engaged people’s sense of the real, or more specifically, the boundary between the real and the represented” (Lastra 66). Early cinema was both a response to and a source of the disorienting transformations of modernity.
 
“Talkies” remains the popular shorthand for the advent of sound, but in talkies the Hollywood actor’s voice suffers the fate Cavarero and others have ascribed to the voice more generally: it is reduced to language, subjugated to the visual, and disembodied through metaphor. In many ways, the dominance of the image in film studies makes screen acting extremely difficult to recognize and interpret. The scholarship on stardom, rooted in the conception of persona as image, is rich and varied, while many recent studies of film acting note the ways in which a variety of both formalist and theoretical approaches to film effect what Pamela Robertson Wojcik calls the “disappearance of the actor” (5). The mediating technologies of film, especially editing, have long been seen as compromising, or even creating, individual performances, an idea often traced to Soviet theorists, in particular Lev Kuleshov. Alan Lovell and Peter Krämer argue that the formalist focus on mise-en-scène in film studies reduces acting to a visual object, something for the director to “place in the scene.” One consequence they note is “that the use of the voice—a key part of acting—is neglected” (2).
 
As Chion argues, the talkies featured not the voice of the actor but the primacy of dialogue. For Chion this is a primary characteristic of classical cinema. David Bordwell demonstrates that filmmaking in studio-era Hollywood was organized around a limited and well-defined set of techniques and conventions according to which all aspects of filmmaking served the narrative, creating an aesthetic grounded in continuity and transparency. Studio filmmakers commonly describe what has come to be known as classical Hollywood style by imagining the camera as a storyteller (Bordwell 24). That storyteller is another “imaginary body,” one defined as an expressive voice speaking through the camera’s eye. Narrative voice is a common figure for the intentionality of narration, which is acute in the rhetoric of classical Hollywood style.
 
The actor’s voice has historically been one of the aspects of filmmaking placed in service to the narrative voice. Chion terms this the “verbocentrism” of classical cinema, which follows from the power of dialogue, clearly spoken and necessary to the action, to organize the scenic space “around its articulation” (78).[4] Rather than placing the actor and the art of acting at the center of both image and sound, the verbocentric rhetoric of scene construction that dominated Hollywood filmmaking from the late 1930s through the 1940s “rigorously circumscribed and framed” acting (Chion 78). In the early 1930s, audio engineers debated the relative merits of “fidelity” and “intelligibility.” In theory, “fidelity” to “sound as heard by a character” was privileged, but in practice microphones came to be conventionally placed close the speaker to reduce reverberation and ensure that what the actor said could be understood (Lastra 142). In classical Hollywood cinema, when the narrative speaks, dialogue is heard. As silent film star Norma Desmond memorably decries in Sunset Boulevard, with the advent of sound, actors opened their mouths and out came “words, words, more words.”
 
I believe that Chion’s emphasis on the gap between performance and dialogue, voice and words, opens a possibility for finding the material voice of the actor in classical Hollywood film. Chion argues that the restriction of the actor’s voice within the conventions of sound cinema reduced the sensorial, affective possibilities of the movies. Hansen shares Chion’s interest in Hollywood cinema as a sensorium and on those grounds challenges the implications of the “classical” as an organizing paradigm for studio-era narrative cinema. Rather than prizing formal coherence defined, in her view, in reference to ahistorical aesthetic values, Hansen argues we should understand Hollywood cinema as a form of “vernacular modernism.”[5] Narrative voice creates the illusion of coherence invested in an imaginary body signified by the camera; the material voice registers in the affectivity Hansen locates in the more embodied possibilities of the vernacular. As Hansen argues, the vernacular combines “everyday usage, with connotations of discourse, idiom, and dialect, with circulation, promiscuity, and translatability,” possibilities denied by the expectations and values associated with classicism (60).[6]
 
If the vernacular is not reducible to the voice, the voice is central to its conception as trope and medium. Imagined within a paradigm of vernacular modernism, the actor’s voice is no longer assimilated as easily to the rhetoric of the shot. Hansen emphasizes the audience’s embodied, affective experience of cinema as a reflexive response to modernity’s much broader transformation of human experience, including “the mass production of the senses” (70). This model allows film acting to be valued for precisely the complications that have long stymied its study: the separation of the performance from the body of the actor; its translation by technologies of recording; the codes of editing that fragment time, space, and bodies. Rather than looking through the “transparent” style of classical Hollywood and prizing the coherence of story, character, and world, Hansen’s audience participates in cinema as a vernacular response to their own experience of dislocation within modernity.
 
How do these theories of voice and vernacular in classical Hollywood cinema apply to performative practice? I want to briefly consider the cultivation of a distinctive masculine vocal style in the studio era. Little research in film studies focuses on the development of Hollywood vocal performance conventions. The extra-verbal qualities of the voice, such as timbre, pitch, range, pace, and volume are considered primarily in relation to technological development and recording practice by scholars who rely on naturalized assumptions regarding vocal quality. Bordwell notes that in the development of sound cinema, improvements in recording fidelity that “sought to eliminate the ‘fuzzy high notes’ and sibilants” in the mid-1930s were expected to “especially benefit” women’s voices (308). The normalizing of a narrow low register of the male voice has gone without remark in film history. The popular narrative of the advent of sound assumes voices already existed to be recorded; the largely apocryphal story that silent film star John Gilbert failed to make the transition to sound film because of a weak voice supports the presumption that actors have rather than cultivate suitable dramatic voices.[7] Acting, however, depends on the active development and control of vocal qualities such as pitch and range.
 
Influential voice teacher Kristen Linklater describes the specific physiological effect of what she terms “an unconscious need to sound manly or in control” that pushes “the larynx down so that the sound only resonates in the lower cavities, and a monotonously rich, deep voice is developed that cannot find nuance and varied inflection from the upper part of the range” (23). I believe that this “manly” norm of a “monotonously rich, deep voice” was shaped quite consciously by the evolution of male vocal performance style in studio-era Hollywood. To demonstrate this claim, I want to briefly compare James Cagney’s rapid delivery in the gangster films of the early 1930s and Humphrey Bogart’s development of a restrained, laconic style in The Maltese Falcon (1941). Both styles were developed through a theatrical manipulation of the pace of delivery and demonstrate the narrowing of pitch range into a tightly controlled, sonorous lower register that became standard for leading men in dramatic roles during the studio era. More specifically, the example of Cagney and Bogart makes clear the vocal conventions Brando challenges and illustrates both the affective power of Hollywood film as a form of vernacular modernism and the tightening of the verbocentric rhetoric described by Chion.
 
Naremore argues that James Cagney brings two key features to sound cinema: his “reedy, nasal voice…redolent of the streets” and “the lightning speed and aerobic force of everything he did” (159). Before Cagney’s ascent to stardom in The Public Enemy (1931), “the talkies had a leaden pace” (Naremore 159). Actors appeared confined by both the awkward accommodation to sound-recording technology and traditional declamatory acting practices. Cagney, with experience as a song and dance man, moves and speaks at a quicker and more varied tempo. His most characteristic lines build on repetitions of sounds and phrasing; for example, he punctuates the quick succession of t, l, and o sounds in “Why that dirty yellow-bellied no-good stool” from The Public Enemy. Cagney seems to speak twice as fast as the other actors, expressing through tone, tempo, and inflection an expanded range of emotion and ambiguous moral characterization.[8] This rapid, staccato “rat-a-tat-tat” delivery would be borrowed widely, becoming the performance signature of the immensely popular gangster films of the early 1930s. The recognizable theatricality of the gangsters’ highly stylized delivery was its most resonant feature, carrying an almost danceable quality. Censored and generalized, the gangsters’ slang does not mimic an existing dialect. Rather, their vocal style echoes  the rhythmic mechanical sounds of urban modernity: the elevated trains, typewriters, machine-guns, and film projectors that shape the landscape of the genre. The emergence of this style of cinematic speech as a Hollywood convention creates a vernacular form that can elicit embodied feeling from the audience about the very forces that define the dehumanizing tendencies of industrial production: the shaping of the body to mechanical repetition.
 
The excesses of the gangster film would be censored and contained by the mid-1930s; machine guns were banned and Cagney’s expressive range would be contained within the moralistic frame of the Production Code Administration, signs of the broader effort to tighten control over both the content and expressive style of Hollywood film.[9] This is not coincidently the period in which, Chion argues, verbocentrism comes to characterize Hollywood production, giving the intelligibility of dialogue primacy over dramatically rich extra-verbal qualities of voice. Leading men in dramatic roles stake out a low, but not too low, pitch range, one that could both whisper clearly and fill a room without shouting. This narrow range is defined not only against the typically higher feminine voice, but in vivid contrast to male character actors who speak in the more extreme ranges of low or high. In The Maltese Falcon (1941), Humphrey Bogart is framed by the sonorous depths of “fat man” Sidney Greenstreet and the high nasal whine of Peter Lorre. Such control of the voice is key to classical Hollywood’s verbocentrism, foregrounding dialogue by allowing it to “flow” through an established and expected register (Chion 78). Bogart negotiates this restrictive range by dramatically slowing his pace of delivery as part of a calculated development of a new screen persona during the filming of The Maltese Falcon. A Warner Brothers executive was disturbed by the “leisurely, suave form of delivery Bogart had adopted” (Sklar 116). Writing to the film’s producer, he worried the film would lag: “Bogart must have his usual brisk, staccato manner and delivery, and if he doesn’t have it, I’m afraid we are going to be in trouble” (Sklar 116). Resisting the by-then conventional rapid-fire delivery of the gangster films, Bogart crafts a masculine vocal style defined by an aesthetic of controlled restraint, the very style that Brando in turn defies. The story illustrates how consciously an actor’s performance is expected to serve the narrative in classical Hollywood style, but also how extra-verbal aspects of the voice such as tempo, register, range and volume nonetheless retain powerful dramatic possibilities.

Brando’s naturalism

When Brando voiced what Williams’s stage directions call the “heaven-splitting violence” of Stanley’s cry for Stella, he shattered assumptions about the possibilities available to actors (Williams 60). Brando’s Stanley has an unusually extended vocal range—from too loud to too soft, from commanding patriarch to tearful “man-child”—with which to express the full spectrum of the play’s language and emotion. Early accounts of Brando’s breakthrough performance in the stage version of Streetcar emphasize not only the weightlifting he used to create Stanley’s muscular physicality, but also his struggle to find Stanley’s voice. Theater historian David Richard Jones documents how crucial voice is to Brando’s characterization.
 

Only gradually, and through the very technical means of voice placement and diction, did Brando find his way into the part [of Stanley Kowalski]. “I’m an ear man,” he has explained, and once he had located Kowalski’s particular coarseness of speech, the character came into focus around the hard, flat, unSouthern voice, a voice big enough to have grandeur in screaming “STELL-LAHHHHH!” and nasal enough to bite when Stanley confronts Blanche with “So what?” or “Ha-ha-ha!” (Jones 149-50)

As originally written, Stanley is from the South. Williams changed lines of dialogue to accommodate Brando’s “unSouthern” vocal characterization, suggesting the ways in which voice defines both character and the social landscape of the play.
 
In the 1951 Hollywood production of Streetcar, the register of Stanley’s cry offers a shocking affront to the sound of male American movie stars established in the studio era. One challenge to hearing, much less interpreting, Brando’s performance of Stanley’s cry for Stella is its sheer familiarity. That moment continues to circulate as clip, quotation and parody in American culture.[10] The cry reverberates as an expression of overwhelming desire and captures the ambivalence central to both Stanley’s character and Brando’s persona: exposed and vulnerable, yet embodying an animalistic power. In American culture, this moment stands as perhaps the most eloquent expression of a new frankness regarding sexuality and desire that challenged assumptions about gender and identity in post-World War II society. It forms an apparent standard for voicing passion: finding wells of unmediated feeling within and overcoming the barriers to expression without. These assumptions ground Brando’s association with what I am calling a naïve naturalism.
 
The iconic Stella scene encompasses a brief two minutes, from Stanley’s initial cry from the courtyard through the embrace at the foot of the stairs.[11] Stanley cries out for Stella four times in those two minutes. The first cry is answered by the indignant Eunice, who has taken Stella and Blanche into her upstairs apartment. As she shames Stanley for his drunken bellowing and hitting his pregnant wife, he shouts back in a loud voice that is distinctly different, lower and more clipped, than his calls for Stella. Ignoring Eunice, he calls to Stella again, the pitch rising noticeably on the final “lllaaa.” It is only when Eunice goes inside, slamming the door and leaving Stanley alone again in the courtyard, that the full-throated cry that defines the iconic Stanley/Brando is delivered. This third cry is sustained for longer and climbs higher, but is not (as it will next become) shrill. Brando closes his eyes and holds the sides of his head as if to keep the sound from shattering his skull. As a medium shot frames his head and torso, we see the voice being dramatically forced from the body (see figure 1). The pinup-like conventions of the shot—the wet, torn T-shirt revealing the muscular chest; the head tilted back to open both mouth and throat—foreground the upper body’s full capacity to endow the voice with resonance. The power of this image lies in its ability to visualize the expression of the voice and thus to locate that shocking cry, so beyond the familiar registers of American acting of the time, within his sensuous body. We cut to the apartment where Stella hears Stanley’s final cry, which creeps higher and sounds far less controlled, an effect amplified precisely because the voice on screen is now disembodied.
 

Figure 1. The embodied cry for Stella. Still from A Streetcar Named Desire © Warner Brothers, 1997.

This moment offers a tableau of emotional expression apparently stripped of the mediating structures of decorum, discipline, or technology. Especially when isolated from the larger context of the film or play, Stanley’s cry for Stella is easily read as affirming the ideal of expressive realism. In this reading, the voice becomes both figure for and access to an interiority that mirrors the claims for Method acting: authenticity, spontaneity, and freedom from inhibition. Stanley’s cry strips away the conventions defining both the rough decorum of the world within the film and the more genteel one of classical Hollywood; it offers in their stead a heightened, apparently unmediated expression, signified by his relative nakedness, of untempered emotion and thus natural behavior. This idealized understanding of naturalism is subsumed into the authenticity of Brando’s emerging persona.
 
I will complicate this reading, but first want to consider how deeply Brando’s publicized relationship with Method acting and its promise of the authentic performance of deeply felt emotion have conditioned readings of his work and the “Stella” scene in particular. Naremore defines Brando in relation to the Method and the Method in relation to the performance vocabulary developed by Lee Strasberg, the director of the Actor’s studio, which is grounded in “the keywords of romantic individualism”: “‘private moment,’ ‘freedom’ ‘naturalness,’ ‘organic’” (200). Strasberg’s writing has come to exemplify the ideological work of stardom, which cultivates the illusion of performances deemed true to life, a truth most vividly revealed in the close-up. Strasberg’s focus on affective memory, the actor’s use of emotions from his or her own life to enact what the character feels, lends itself to the most naïve understanding of naturalism: that the actor is being himself on screen. Brando never worked with Strasberg, but he has long been praised in these terms. As Cohan argues, the idea of Brando’s authenticity was intentionally crafted into his star persona.
 
For Cohan and Wexman, the fascination with the authenticity promised by Method acting in general and Marlon Brando in particular speaks to the contradictions in postwar culture regarding masculinity. Cohan offers an insightful analysis of the construction of Brando’s persona in the popular press of the 1950s as one of the “boys who would not be men”(202). Like Naremore, Cohan focuses on the disjunction between the praise for Brando’s authenticity and the highly constructed, stylized nature of both Brando’s performance style and emerging persona: “Brando’s celebrated naturalness signified the theatricality of his acting, not as technical expertise, but as the ground in which he performed ‘maleness’ and wore it on his body as a masquerade” (244). The eroticizing of Brando’s body, not the cry, becomes the defining aspect of the “Stella” scene in Cohan’s reading.
 

A Streetcar Named Desire made Brando’s physique a central element in his personification of youthful male sexuality for the fifties, most famously when, his wet T-shirt clinging to his body and torn to reveal the expanse of his muscular back, Stanley Kowalski (Brando) summons his visibly aroused wife, Stella (Kim Hunter), back to their apartment following a violent quarrel. (244)

I agree with Cohan’s interpretation of Brando’s emerging persona, but persona is a meta-text that subsumes performance into discourse, in this case the discourse of “youthful male sexuality for the fifties.” The passionate cry is hardly recognizable in Cohan’s characterization of it as a “summons,” diminished precisely by the pin-up qualities of Brando’s physicality. The body becomes an image; without a voice, Brando’s performance loses its resonance.
 
Returning the voice to that iconic body and the iconic “Stella” scene to its context within A Streetcar Named Desire enables a reading of Brando’s naturalism as the embodiment of sensory experience within the technologically mediated postwar world. In the production notes to The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams bemoans “the straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and authentic ice cubes, its characters that speak exactly as its audience speaks.”  The “exhausted theater of realistic conventions” is to be replaced by a “new, plastic theater” dedicated to “a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are” (7). To define the “exhausted” realistic conventions, Williams turns not to the theater of the past, but to the booming postwar consumer culture that was mediating experience with a new intensity. The manufactured world of the Frigidaire undermines the realist ideals of the “genuine” and “authentic.” In Streetcar, Williams invests Stanley’s voice with the new “vivid expression of things as they are,” posing particular challenges to Hollywood conventions. Less noticed is the connection between Stanley and consumer products, the radio and the telephone, that complicate the idea of the genuine, authentic voice.
 
The vivid contrast between poetic and vulgar language and the emotional range of the characters in Williams’s play all but desert the comfortable middle of classical Hollywood’s controlled verbocentrism, as well as the middle-brow morality of the Production Code. Stanley’s dialogue is at times almost comically colloquial, but he cannot be understood to “to speak exactly as [the film’s] audience does.” Stanley’s vocal excessiveness is the most dramatic example of Streetcar’s emphasis on the voice, which helps explain why Brando’s performance became a signature moment in both theater and film history. Brando’s performative range, his ability to shift his voice across the violent extremes of Stanley’s emotional expression, lifts the character out of the mode of realism Williams finds so delimiting. The violence of Stanley’s cry maps one end of this range; mumbling signifies the other. Brando became famous for both. Within Streetcar Stanley’s cry emerges from a carefully staged confrontation in which the radio and telephone play significant roles. The fight begins when Stanley throws the radio through the window (see figure 2). Blanche has been playing music on the radio to counter the sounds of Stanley’s poker game and stage a romantic scene of “enchantment.”

 

Figure 2. Stanley throws the radio out the window. Still from A Streetcar Named Desire © Warner Brothers, 1997.

The fight that follows leaves Stanley alone in the apartment, mumbling Stella’s name and crying the tears that shocked contemporary audiences. Stanley then reaches for the telephone to call Stella (see figure 3). When we cut to Eunice answering the phone in the upstairs apartment, Stanley’s voice is heard only as a tinny echo; the scene never cuts to him speaking into the phone. The phone abstracts and reduces Stanley’s voice, failing in its technological promise to erase distance.
 

Figure 3. Stanley attempts to call Stella on the telephone. A Streetcar Named Desire © Warner Brothers, 1997.

Readings of Brando’s acting that limit it to emotive revelations of interiorized psychology miss the profoundly social resonance of his voice. The radio and the phone remind us of the increasing commonness of the disembodied voice and thus help frame the unexpected power of the cry’s dramatic embodiment. More than symbols of a technologically alienating society, they belong to Stanley. If the Kowalskis’ particular corner of the French Quarter seems far removed from the larger post-WWII boom of affluence and consumption, the phone and the radio effectively tie them to the larger social pattern, as does Stella’s pregnancy. These modern consumer goods support Stella’s belief in Stanley as a man with a future, in contrast to the uncivilized brute Blanche sees. The products Williams chooses to make this point extend the range of the human voice. Stanley’s world is one in which mumbling is no longer always intimately proximate to the body, as recording technology becomes increasing adept at capturing the voice in less declarative registers.
 
When Stella answers Stanley’s cry, not with her voice but with that infamously slow and equally embodied walk down the stairs, they cling together in a physical embrace of unusual intensity. The camera comes close enough to see Stella’s fingers dig into Stanley’s exposed back, a vividly tactile and sensual gesture. If the male voice typically plays against a higher feminine one, it may be impossible for Stella to speak once Stanley’s cry has climbed into the upper register. Instead, she feels his voice and answers with her touch. The camera comes closer still as Stanley stands to lift her, burying his face in her throat as he implores, “Don’t ever leave me, Baby.”  This is the intimate register the mumble signifies, the voice heard in close-up. The words are clear and clearly muffled; we hear how close Stanley’s lips are to Stella’s body. The radio and telephone signify an uncanny power to clearly project the intimacy of the voice far beyond the body’s physical presence. By carrying the voice both beyond the established masculine range and bringing it much, much closer than the engineers’ ideal perspective of “an imaginary body in real space,” Streetcar challenges the conventions of classical Hollywood cinema that disguise both its own techniques of disembodiment and the significance of those techniques within sensorial experience.
 
Brando’s voice measures the intimate distance crossed, expressing the conflicting emotions motivating the famous cry: desire and fear, possession and abandonment, power and abjection. This is more than a personal journey. Blanche’s first and best explanation for her sister’s inexplicable embrace of the vulgar Stanley is the uniform he was wearing as a returning soldier when they first met. Seen today, the references to World War II in Streetcar seem an expected but hardly meaningful bit of historical background. In 1947 and 1951, when the play and then the film premiered, the violence, dislocations and sensory shocks of the war defined the social horizon of the audience’s experience. Stanley’s cry is terrible and iconic precisely because it speaks to the palpable pressure of that experience. His fear of being left alone takes on historical and social significance if we think of him as a veteran whose homecoming must be anchored in his wife’s physical presence and the promise of their expected child.
 
Giving full attention to the voice tells a more complicated story about the significance of embodiment in a world in which sensory experience has been violently transformed. Threatened by the radio and contained by the telephone, Stanley’s voice cries out in protest against the very forces of technological progress with which he is supposed to be aligned. Brando’s performance enacts the voice’s investment in the body even as it recognizes the technologies of disembodiment that shape Stanley’s world. Brando’s body has long been invoked as a sign of the transformation of postwar society, but it is the range of his voice that best expresses the imperatives of that moment.

The Constructed Voice of the Godfather

Twenty years later, Marlon Brando created a very different voice for Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather. The story of this creation is perhaps the best-known example in Hollywood history of the way that an actor constructs a part. Required to obtain a screen test by studio executives opposed to Brando’s casting, Coppola filmed a relatively informal makeup test. Brando blackened his blond hair with shoe polish and padded his mouth with Kleenex, creating the jowled appearance of a bulldog. In a clip that continues to circulate on the internet, Brando slowly turns toward the camera, Kleenex showing beneath his top lip, and begins to improvise the roughened timbre of the Don. The Kleenex in Brando’s cheeks dampen his ability to project, helping to construct a voice held back within the throat and further emphasizing the forward set of his jaw. Low, raspy, guttural, constrained, and yet polite, questioning, and intimate: in the film Don Corleone’s voice lacks the sonorous presence typical of empowered masculinity. Its timbre expresses a tension and coarseness belied by its soft volume and simple decorousness. Embodied in a sotto voce register, the power of the Don’s voice lies precisely in his ability to withhold it. His soft-spokenness seems both strategic and necessary. His voice sounds damaged, testifying to the violence of his long, difficult climb to power and prosperity. The film enacts this history in the assassination attempt; shot multiple times, the only bandage we see protectively covers the Don’s throat. Stanley’s howl of fear and desire locates the voice deep in the body, his own body and Stella’s as well, as that call draws her down the stairs in a walk so sensuous it was censored. Held back in the throat, the Godfather’s voice, too, speaks from, of, and to the body.
 
The affective qualities of these two vocal performances suggest a changing understanding of the relation between mediation and naturalism. Actor as well as character appears stripped bare in Streetcar; The Godfather, a technically innovative period piece, self-reflexively acknowledges the movies and the history of its iconic star. In short, Stanley’s voice has been understood to come from within Brando, an idea enhanced by the psychological turn of Method acting, whereas the Godfather’s voice is recognized as a richly constructed, highly credible illusion. Chion identifies Brando’s performance in The Godfather as a crucial moment in a larger shift toward audience recognition of the construction of the voice. Chion offers as contrast the useful example of Singing in the Rain (1952) to illustrate what changed:
 

The film turns on a belief in the possibility of recreating a natural unity through dream, special effects or fantasy and of finding the “right” voice for the “right” body. It is this belief that seems to disappear in the 1970s: there is no appropriate voice; every voice is a construction; a specific composition with the body. (142)

Chion cites the demon voice emerging from Linda Blair’s girlish body in The Exorcist and Darth Vader’s humanizing baritone in Star Wars as other examples of 1970s “dubbed cinema” (141), a fundamental shift in the naturalized logic of synchronization. Brando’s performance in The Godfather would seem a radically different example, one built on an actor’s choices rather than a post-production matching of a voice to a body.
 

Yet Brando’s vocal performance in The Godfather is exemplary precisely because it sustains the actor’s illusion of naturalism within an increasingly mediated social world and the transformed medium of Hollywood film. In A Streetcar Named Desire the naturalized relation of body and voice is challenged symbolically by the transformative power (and threat) of sound technology figured by the radio and telephone, but the film itself resists the technical innovations of its moment. Like the other films that defined Brando’s persona in the early 1950s, Streetcar is shot in traditional aspect ratio and black and white, rather than the emerging widescreen cinematography with stereophonic sound. This traditional framing makes the challenge Brando’s voice poses to the norms of classical Hollywood acting all the more apparent. Set in 1946, The Godfather returns to the postwar moment of Streetcar and poses many of the same questions about male power in a changing world, but through a now dramatically and technically transformed medium. In the years after World War II, sound recording technology underwent an almost constant process of development. A new soundscape came to the movies through a gradual expansion into higher and lower frequencies, and an increasingly sophisticated ability to layer sound. Voices could exist within layers of ambient sound that “were denser and more refined” with the result that “things on screen were perceived to have more physical presence” (Chion 119). Editor Walter Murch made his first widely recognized innovations in creating a richer, more complex world of ambient sound for The Godfather. (Chion dedicates Film, A Sound Art to Murch “with admiration and gratitude.”) The film’s enriched soundscape increasingly defines the scenic space; the actor’s voice is no longer framed by the image and extra-verbal qualities of the voice gain power over dialogue.
 
The Godfather’s presentation of the male voice, Brando’s in particular, is highly self-reflexive. I want to explore the film’s meditation on the male voice and the actor’s role by focusing on two scenes from the initial sequence at Connie’s wedding. The tour-de-force opening shot is the most powerful demonstration of the new place of the actor’s voice in 1970s cinema, but first I want to consider the scene in which singer Johnny Fontane (Al Martino) asks for his Godfather’s help because it thematizes the relations between the male voice, the movies, and power with a knowing nod to Brando’s career. Upon his arrival, Johnny sings a love song to the bride in English and Italian, holding the large, square microphone of the late 1940s in an intimate loving embrace. As Jacob Smith has argued, the enormously popular male crooner style uses the microphone’s power of projection to create an intimate illusion of physically proximate space (84-85). The power of Johnny’s performance resonates across the wedding’s large crowd, reaching even to Kay (Diane Keaton) and Michael (Al Pacino) sitting on the periphery. Kay’s wide-eyed excitement at Johnny’s performance seems the one moment she belongs in her surroundings. Johnny’s voice transcends the bodies around him by creating a lush romantic ideal suggestively removed from power and violence.
 
The apparent power of the public, feminized intimacy of Johnny’s projected voice will be immediately challenged by the confession he makes at his Godfather’s side: “I don’t know what to do. My voice is weak, it’s weak.” In the masculine privacy of the Don’s office, Johnny’s smooth tenor drops into a husky, weary register of defeat. Unable to sing, he sees acting as a way to get “back on top again,” but a studio mogul has refused him the perfect part. “Oh Godfather, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do.” He begins to cry, face in hands, offering an ironic tribute to the postwar transformation of masculinity popularly associated with Method acting.[12] What follows is a remarkable moment of self-reflexive performance on Brando’s part. Don Corleone jumps from his chair, pulls Johnny’s hands from his face and shakes them. “You can act like a man,” he shouts, raising his voice for the first and only time in the film (see figure 4). Slapping Johnny, he continues to berate him: “What’s a matter with you? Is this how you turned out?  A Hollywood finocchio that cries like a woman?” He mimics stage sobs before continuing, his voice returning to its softer volume, “What is that nonsense? Ridiculous.”  Using a disparaging Italian slang term for homosexual, Brando voices the criticism long attached to his own persona as one of the “boys who were not men.” Rejecting the soft weeping masculinity of Hollywood, Brando apparently asserts bodily strength as the antidote to the weak voice, although the requirement remains to “act like a man” rather than be one. For the Don in his outburst is also acting. Advisor Tom Hagan (Robert Duvall) smiles and remains seated, a sign that this violent display is not to be taken seriously.
 

Figure 4. The Godfather raises his voice: “You can act like a man!” The Godfather © Paramount 2008.

For all its inside jokes, the scene with Johnny Fontane motivates the most famous demonstration of the Godfather’s persuasive power: the infamous scene in which Woltz, the studio mogul frustrating Johnny’s ambition, awakens to discover the severed head of his prized race horse in his bed. Johnny’s effective yet weak voice establishes the particular power of the Godfather’s roughened, restrained one, which eschews all forms of projection; the Godfather’s voice is strongest when he hardly speaks at all. This truth is told in various ways throughout the film. At the wedding, the physically intimidating Luca Brasi (Lenny Montana) painfully rehearses the thanks he seeks to deliver to the Don for being invited to the wedding. This comic spectacle, the big man reciting like a school boy, sets the scene for Michael to tell the story of how his father helped Johnny with his career. When a bandleader refused to release Johnny from his contract, the Don retuned the next day with Luca Brasi, who held a gun to the bandleader’s head while the Don “assured him that either his signature or his brains would be on the contract.” Brando’s construction of the Don’s weak, wounded voice befits a world in which he is carefully attended by a family of sons and soldiers whose powerful bodies enact his will. The old, wizened voice is matched to younger, stronger bodies; this is what it means to act like a man. Embodiment in this film extends through social relations revealed in spectacular displays of violence, reinforcing both the sensual affect associated with naturalism and the audience’s increasingly conscious appreciation of realistic special effects.
 
The attenuated relation of body and voice registered in the Godfather’s voice is, as Chion suggests, profoundly cinematic. The Godfather begins with an extravagant demonstration of the power of the voice to shape the image rather than being contained by it. The film opens with a refusal, holding a black, silent screen for twenty seconds, just long enough for the audience to recognize its intentional emptiness. Only then do the slow, plaintive notes of a single trumpet resound in the darkness. The heraldic notes reverberate, constructing a space of anticipation. After a minute and a half, the trumpet’s last note dies, and only then does a human voice—male, accented, and emphatic—speak from the darkness: “I believe in America.” The voice precedes a tight close-up of the supplicant Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto), telling the story of his daughter’s brutal beating and the failure of American justice. A justifiably famous slow zoom-out enabled by “a recently developed computer-timed zoom lens” follows, tracing the path of Bonasera’s plea for justice and its demand for a response (Lewis 6). When the zoom finally ends, the shot assumes its placement looking over the Don’s shoulder, but too close for conventional filmic composition; the Don is out of focus with the camera indiscreetly poised to whisper in his ear (see figure 5).
 

Figure 5. The space created for the Godfather’s voice by the slow zoom out in the opening of The Godfather.

As Chion writes in the opening of The Voice in the Cinema, “The voice is elusive. Once you’ve eliminated everything that is not the voice itself—the body that houses it, the words it carries, the notes it sings, the traits by which it defines a speaking person, and the timbers that color it, what’s left?” (Voice 1). This virtuosic zoom-out finds the elusive voice by rendering, through the movement of the camera, the space the voice occupies as a dynamic feature of scene construction rather than an object of representation. The elusive voice becomes a particular aspect of and figure for the elusive performance of the actor. By creating the space required for the voice rather than fitting the voice within the frame, the opening sequence of The Godfather sets the stage for Brando’s legendary performance. Like the supplicant Bonasera, the audience is obliged to listen, not just to the Don, but to Brando, measuring the power of his vocal performance by his clearly conscious choice to withhold the very qualities that would have made his voice familiar and identifiable to an audience provocatively reminded of its own anticipation in the film’s opening minutes.[13]
 
The opening scene of The Godfather contrasts what might be thought of as two vocal epistemologies, the declarative and the interrogative, that are rooted in radically different understandings of naturalism and mediation. Bonasera begins by testifying to his own success, but the reflexivity of the blank screen reflects the skepticism of the 1970s and New Hollywood’s interrogation of old truths. The scene questions the idea of testimony itself, which presumes the transparent ability to voice the truth. Bonasera’s declarative style naturalizes voice as the sign of individual self-possession rooted in an assumption that actions, including speech, have logical consequences and that justice is self-evident. Don Corleone responds to Bonasera primarily with questions: “Why didn’t you come to me?”; “What is it you want me to do?”; “What have I done to cause you to treat me with such disrespect?” These questions voice a deeper, unstated demand, one expressed not in words, but by the timbre of the voice. Finally chastened, Bonasera asks in a penitential tone, “Be my friend?” which elicits coy gestures as Brando looks down and away until he adds, “Godfather?”  The Don replies, “Good,” judging Bonasera’s properly respectful performance rather than answering his question. The proud, outraged bearer of his own story told in his own voice is ultimately obliged to listen to what the Don does not say. Bonasera’s declaration is forced to bend to the Godfather’s interrogative performance, which discovers rather than declares the truth.
 
It is not difficult to map this contrast in style onto the challenge the Method poses to traditional acting practices dependent on proper elocution and poise. If “mumbling” seems an inadequate description of Brando’s soft-spoken moments as Stanley or as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, it captures the degree to which his voice is heard to fall away from a recognizable standard of speech in the movies, a giving up of the masculine control over the voice that was consciously defined in the studio era. Mumbling, like the interrogative, makes the sound of the voice apparent; foregrounding vocal timbre undermines the transparent expression of language as meaning. Brando’s particular vocal achievement is supported and enriched by The Godfather’s consistent foregrounding of voice through screenplay and mise-en-scène, character and plot, theme and symbol, performance and technological innovation. From the opening silence of a black screen to the final gesture of a door closing between Kay and the now ascendant Don, Michael, the audience is made witness to a sotto voce world in which truth and power are conveyed by whispered asides, unheard by those like Kay who are excluded from the closed circle of initiated men. Sotto voce is more than a metaphor here.
 
In the film’s opening scene, the voice speaks alone and then is dramatically endowed with weight, physical presence, and context. The empty soundtrack that Bonasera initially fills with his statement of belief (“I believe in America”) will soon extend into deepening layers of the film’s innovative, dynamic, and discontinuous sound design. The wedding scenes offer Murch his first opportunity to use the full technical resources of a Hollywood studio to develop the ability to shift perspective in sound. In interviews he describes “painfully reconstruct[ing], out of bits and pieces, a master track of the atmosphere” (Ondaatje 99). This not only creates the rich contrast between the loud, busy sounds of the wedding party and their muffled presence in the Don’s office, but exploits rather than smooths over various noises of mediation endemic to the sound of the party, including what Murch calls “loudspeakery music” and “rackety voices” (Ondaatje 99).
 
The Godfather was the perfect comeback vehicle for Brando precisely because it returns him to this expressively framed vernacular American space. At 48, Brando was much younger than the character he was playing. More than the padding, makeup and jowl-enhancing camera angles, it is the voice that allows the audience to believe Brando’s performance so completely. The violence of Stanley’s cry for Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire grounds the unspoken history of the Don’s distinctively damaged voice. This connection constitutes Brando’s comeback, the moment in which he once again voices the weight of being in the world. What gradually accrues in the opening of The Godfather is a world shaped by the characteristics Hansen prizes in the vernacular, the promiscuous circulation of everyday usage. The Kleenex in Brando’s cheeks resonates in public memory not as a trick, but as insight into the way filmmaking can so powerfully authenticate performance as construction within a complexly mediated world.

Conclusion

Apocalypse Now (1979) features Brando’s last meaningful performance as well as the first demonstration of the power of six-channel Dolby 5.1 surround sound at the movies. This coincidence offers a fitting point of conclusion to my discussion of Brando’s voice and its ability to both exemplify naturalism and foreground its construction through the mediating technologies of its age. Brando does not appear until nearly two hours into the film, but his performance begins much earlier when a large Sony reel-to-reel recorder/player is switched on during the intelligence briefing in which Willard (Martin Sheen) receives his mission to terminate the command of Col. Walter Kurtz (Brando). “I heard his voice on the tape and it really put the hook in me,” Willard later confesses in voice-over while studying images of the younger Brando as the younger Kurtz. “But I couldn’t connect that voice with this man.” To a greater extent than A Streetcar Named Desire or The Godfather, Apocalypse Now forgoes basic principles of realism. It exploits surreal overlays of discordant realities, often by refusing to rationalize the synchronization of sound and image, voice and body. Even so, the voice retains a material presence and affective power, one heightened for the movie audience by the depth and tactility of Dolby surround sound.^[14]
 
If Kurtz’s message supports the General’s conclusion that he has “quite obviously gone insane,” the hook that draws Willard up the river lies in the quality of the voice, not the language spoken. That voice is unmistakably Brando’s, marked by his unusual phrasing and that unexpected, slight but distinctive lisp: “I watched—–a snail—–crawl along the edge—–of a straight razor——-That’s my dream——It’s my nightmare—–.” Softly dragging sibilants and clipping the ends of “straight” and “razor,” his voice has a disturbingly tactile quality. Brando’s extended pauses prolong the visceral effect of imagining soft flesh moving against a razor’s sharp edge. Those pauses also suggest both improvisation and confession, qualities long associated with the authenticity of Method acting, which heightens the otherness of Kurtz’s message.[15] Compared to the highly constructed voice of Don Corleone or the exaggerated Irish brogue Brando adopted in The Missouri Breaks (1976), the tape appears once again to reveal Brando’s natural voice.^[16]
 

Figure 6. Brando’s entrance in Apocalypse Now via the surveillance recording of Kurtz’s broadcast. © Paramount 2006.

Basic elements of the scene, however, compromise ideas of the natural or even normal: the surreal image of the snail, the homey lunch table where assassination is plotted, the mission that will never exist, and most profoundly, the Sony reel-to-reel recorder/player from which Brando’s voice emanates (see figure 6). Through that technology, Brando’s voice enters the room with a fullness of tone that commands authority both within the scene (the officers seem suspended while listening to it) and the film’s soundscape. Brando’s pauses make space to hear the hiss and high-frequency whine of the recording’s long reach of surveillance. The intimacy of Brando’s address to the microphone, bound to those dirty sounds of recording, acts out the pressures and contradictions of sensual experience in a mediated world. Dolby surround sound deepens the effect of both the material, sensual presence of Brando’s voice and its profound distance from an originating body.
 
I don’t think any discussion of acting in Hollywood cinema can be fully satisfying without some reference to the idea of naturalism. Brando’s voice maps the historical valence of naturalism within the mediating technologies of cinematography, sound recording, and the audiovisual medium of cinema. As Lastra observes, “Simulation…remains to this day a fairly unchanged ideal. Perceptual and representational technologies (like 3-D images and stereo sounds) still take the human body and human perceptual experience as a sine qua non” (218-219). Notions of naturalism in acting that seek to locate nature outside the cinematic text, in the body and feelings of the actor or in principles of human nature, deny the ways in which sensory human experience has served as the reference point for both recording technologies and the idea of cinema. As Hansen argues, cinema’s vernacular modernism allows the audience not just to see, but also to feel and respond to the experience of an increasingly mechanized, centralized, and mediated world (70-71). Conceived in these terms, the recorded, fragmented, reconstructed and mediated performances of actors in cinema, the very technologies of synchronizing sound and image, body and voice, are less problems to be overcome than sensations to be reflexively shared. Brando challenges an overly conventionalized and delimited idea of the male voice. With the young man’s cry and the old man’s diffident rasp, Brando does not liberate the natural voice, but expresses the feeling of a world in which technological mediation is an increasingly intimate experience.