'Brando's Smile' review: A Marlon Brando biography by Susan L. Mizruchi

BRANDO'S SMILE: His Life, Thought, and Work, by Susan L. Mizruchi. W.W. Norton & Company, 469 pp. $27.95.

'How the hell can an actor like that come from Omaha, Nebraska?" said stage and film legend Paul Muni after appearing with 22-year-old Marlon Brando in the Broadway production of "A Flag is Born" in 1946.

The answer, as Boston University English professor Susan L. Mizruchi says in this smooth-reading and informative portrait, is that Omaha started him on the path to his eventual success. There, with plenty of time on his hands and free from the distractions of big-city life, Brando learned how to observe people and combine their language and gestures into an astonishing range of roles, from thuggish, sexy Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire" (both the play and the 1951 film) to the aristocratic Mafia don in "The Godfather" (1972) and, in between, a repressed gay Army officer, a Japanese interpreter, a Mexican revolutionary, a Roman dictator and, for good measure, the singing, dancing gambler Sky Masterson in "Guys and Dolls" (1955).

Seeing someone as familiar as Brando with fresh eyes is as difficult as gazing anew at the Mona Lisa. Besides describing Brando's powers of observation, Mizruchi makes two more points that add to our knowledge of the great actor's technique. First, she details how he used his omnivorous appetite for books (he had some 4,000 in his personal library) to complicate and flesh out the characters he portrayed. For example, he acquired more than a hundred books on Polynesia and related topics as he got ready to play Fletcher Christian in "Mutiny on the Bounty."

Brando also rewrote the scripts for most of his films. Mizruchi often places the original passages against Brando's rewrites, and the differences can be astounding. For example, in the opening scene of "The Godfather," where the undertaker Bonasera offers to pay for the killing of two men who beat his daughter savagely, the Don's reply is stilted and evasive in the original screenplay:

"Why are you afraid to give your first allegiance to me? You go to the law courts and wait for months. You spend money on lawyers who know you're to be made a fool of."

Brando's rewrite is eloquent and visceral:

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"Bonasera, Bonasera, what have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully? If you had come to me in friendship, then the scum that ruined your daughter would be suffering this very day."

Close observer, tireless reader and writer: This tells us more, yes, but not all. When Francis Ford Coppola met with Brando to plan for the actor's last great movie, "Apocalypse Now" (1979), the director was disappointed. Perhaps Coppola was expecting the "real" Marlon Brando, someone who, by that time, no longer existed. We're still looking for him today.