ShareThisBy BRUCE DANCIS
Monday, November 20, 2006
Gary Cooper and Marlon Brando were both major Hollywood stars, but they couldn't have been more different as actors.
Cooper, the epitome of the "strong, silent type" of film actor for whom changes of emotion resonate only slightly on his usually placid face, got his start when he literally had to be silent, during the last years of the silent-film era.
Brando emerged two decades after Cooper as the quintessential Method actor, inhabiting and playing complex, tormented characters on both the stage and screen.
"The Marlon Brando Collection" (Warner Home Video, $59.92, various ratings) and "Gary Cooper: The Signature Collection" (Warner Home Video, $49.92, various ratings) bring together five films apiece from these famous actors.
The two-disc "Mutiny on the Bounty" special edition DVD (available separately for $26.99) is the centerpiece of the Brando collection, but the film is a lengthy and expensive disaster.
Trevor Howard gives a fine, tempered performance as the cruel Bligh, but Brando, for better and worse, plays Christian as a foppish British dandy of a gentleman with a prissy speaking style and a uniform that stays sparklingly clean even after months at sea.
Much has been written about this ill-fated production _ it's often talked about in the same breath as 1963's "Cleopatra" as an example of epic movies that went way over budget and lost millions of dollars. Brando was blamed for disrespecting veteran director Lewis Milestone, a last-minute replacement for original director Carol Reed, and for causing the delays that led to the movie costing an estimated $19 million (or $117 million in 2005 dollars), and losing an estimated $10 million.
The other movies in the Brando collection are "Julius Caesar" (1953), in which Brando, as Marc Antony, holds his own in a cast of Shakespearean veterans such as John Gielgud, James Mason, Louis Calhern and Deborah Kerr; "The Teahouse of the August Moon" (1956), a comic oddity, uncomfortable to watch, in which Brando plays a Japanese interpreter for American troops occupying post-war Okinawa; "Reflections in a Golden Eye" (1967), where Brando adopts a strange Southern accent to play an Army officer who is married to Elizabeth Taylor but is a closet homosexual; and "The Formula" (1980), in which he plays an oil industry honcho being investigated by police detective George C. Scott.
The Cooper collection is also uneven, packaging four less-than-memorable films from the latter days of the actor's career with one that brought him his first Academy Award, 1941's "Sergeant York," which was also Hollywood's biggest box-office hit of the year.
In addition to Howard Hawks' usually accomplished direction and Cooper's sincere performance as real-life World War I hero Alvin York, "Sergeant York's" success was closely tied to its timing. It had its premiere in July 1941 and went into wide distribution at the end of September 1941, as America began moving inexorably toward getting involved in World War II.
As the DVD documentary "Sergeant York: Of God and Country" makes clear, the movie had an unmistakable propaganda purpose _ to combat isolationist sentiment and make the case for U.S. involvement in the global war.
It's the story of a hardworking backwoods Tennessee farmer (Cooper) whose devout Christianity teaches him "thou shalt not kill." But after much introspection and being turned down for conscientious objector status, he agrees to become a soldier. While serving in France, his courage and country sharp shooting save the lives of his platoon members as he kills nearly two dozen German soldiers and takes 132 enemy soldiers prisoner.
To its credit, the movie avoids taking a condescending attitude toward the backwoods Tennesseans in York's community, presenting them as hard-working, decent people with a solid core of beliefs that sustain them through economic hardship.
But seen today, one's opinion of "Sergeant York" probably will have much to do with a viewer's attitude toward "old-time religion" and old-fashioned patriotism, and whether the movie is viewed as sincere and genuine or over sentimental and lacking subtlety. And the age gap between Cooper, just shy of 40 when he made the movie, and his love interest in the film, the 16-year-old Joan Leslie, seems kind of wide.
Still, "Sergeant York" is far more accomplished than the other movies in the Cooper collection. In "The Fountainhead" (1949), Ayn Rand's paean to ultra-individualism, Cooper's performance as the idealistic, renegade architect Howard Roark is sunk by all the speeches Rand gives him.
The actor is more successful in the Westerns included here: "Dallas" (1950), where he portrays a former Confederate soldier who comes to Texas seeking revenge; and "Springfield Rifle" (1952), a Civil War story in which Cooper plays a U.S. Army officer who poses as a Confederate sympathizer to catch horse rustlers.
Finally, in "The Wreck of the Mary Deare" (1959), his next-to-last film, Cooper plays the first officer on a freighter, a "ghost ship" on which something terrible has occurred, with Charlton Heston co-starring as a salvage boat captain who comes to Cooper's aid.
(Bruce Dancis can be reached at bdancis(at)sacbee.com)
