Stills from Marlon Brando’s 1947 screen test for an early iteration of Rebel Without A Cause. An excerpt from Michael Wood on Brando:

… the closest we get to a new understanding of the career is in a quoted remark of Harold Clurman’s: ‘Yes, there is something in Marlon that resents acting, yet he cannot help but be an actor.’ It’s not just that Brando resents, and routinely trivialises, whenever he talks about it, the one thing he is really good at. In all except the most intense of his performances, when his resentment is in abeyance, what we see is an actor of enormous presence whose mind is not entirely on the job. This is not a squandering of talent; it is, in its way, an astonishing display of talent: look how little effort I need to make to be better than almost everyone else. More effort might produce a better performance and sometimes does. But not always, and in every case it ruins the sense of the virtuoso on holiday, the amateur shaming the professionals. Brando’s failures of seriousness are doubtless regrettable, but they are also a form of freedom, and they mean that his much-reiterated scorn of acting is not entirely a pose. So when Bosworth says she is ‘still trying to figure out why this singular artist lost his way’, we might suggest that he chose to lose his way, or chose too often just to stay off the road.