Listen to Me Marlon, an engrossing documentary portrait of Marlon Brando, has more than its share of awkward moments, but none more so than its 1955 clip of the 30-year-old actor appearing on Edward R. Murrow’s CBS interview series Person to Person alongside his 60-year-old father, Marlon Brando Sr. When Murrow asks the father if he’s proud of his son—who has just won an Oscar for On the Waterfront—Marlon Sr. replies, “Well, as an actor, not too proud, but as a man, why quite proud.” Murrow doesn’t follow up on this odd remark, asking instead if Marlon Jr. was difficult to bring up. “I think he had probably a little more trouble with his parents than most children do,” the father replies, as Marlon Jr. grimaces. Given the chance to respond, the actor smiles: “Well, I really don’t feel I need to defend myself. I can lick this guy with one hand, so . . . let it go.”
Those taunts would come back to bite him when Marlon Jr. succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. “I was making more in six months of work than he made in ten years,” Brando recalls in Listen to Me Marlon. “He couldn’t understand how this ne’er-do-well son of his could possibly do that.” Brando may have gotten the last laugh, but when he became a father himself, he would prove similarly neglectful. Christian was the eldest of his 16 children, born in 1958 to Brando and his first wife, actress Anna Kashfi; that marriage ended amid Brando’s serial affairs, and the exes battled for years over custody of the boy. Kashfi drank, and Christian was experimenting with drugs and alcohol by age 13. According to biographer Stefan Kanfer, Brando told his son that “if he was going to drink bourbon and smoke pot, he could at least do it at home, ‘in front of me.’” As a parent Brando would spoil Christian but then forget about him, tending to his movie career and burgeoning political activism.
Directed by Stevan Riley
