Marlon Brando, Viva Zapata!

Won: Cannes Film Festival - Best Actor

It is only appropriate that the man often credited as being the trailblazing force behind bridging the gap between realism and film acting should also thrill us in his ability to bridge the gap between his own whiteness and other ethnicities. Viva Zapata! would not be the only film in the 1950s to which Marlon Brando attempted to play a character of an entirely different ethnicity from his own, and, based on what I've seen, Brando's Emiliano Zapata isn't nearly as jarring or disagreeable as his Sakini in The Teahouse of August Moon, released four years later. But Brando's interpretation of the Mexican revolutionary straddles the threshold of my own tolerance towards whitewashing - for at what point does it become a little too silly, thereby taking the viewer "out" of the picture?

Marlon Brando, A Streetcar Named Desire

A quick search of "sex symbol" might show you Rudolph Valentino, Ramon Novarro, and Sessue Hayakawa as representations of the term for early Hollywood - their respective iconographies suggestive of men who, while undoubtably handsome, were also noble, chivalrous, clean-cut. The same applies for the likes of a young Cary Grant, Gary Cooper and Clark Gable - these are men who are emblems of an old-fashioned "masculine" ideal - good looking, debonair, a smidge cocksure. Enter Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire - vulgar, villainous, biceps bulging out of his tight, sweaty undershirts - to screw shit up a bit.