Editing Marlon Brando (section)

=== 1954–1959: Box office success ===
Brando portrayed [[Napoleon]] in the 1954 film ''[[Désirée (film)|Désirée]]''.

Brando was in the film adaptation of the musical ''[[Guys and Dolls (film)|Guys and Dolls]]'' (1955). ''Guys and Dolls'' would be Brando's first and last musical role. ''[[Time Magazine|Time]]'' found the picture "false to the original in its feeling", remarking that Brando "sings in a faraway tenor that sometimes tends to be flat". Appearing in [[Edward Murrow]]'s ''Person to Person'' interview in early 1955, he admitted to having problems with his singing voice, which he called "pretty terrible". In the 1965 documentary ''Meet Marlon Brando'', he revealed that the final product heard in the movie was a result of countless singing takes being cut into one and later joked, "I couldn't hit a note with a baseball bat; some notes I missed by extraordinary margins&nbsp;... They sewed my words together on one song so tightly that when I mouthed it in front of the camera, I nearly asphyxiated myself". Relations between Brando and costar [[Frank Sinatra]] were also frosty, with Stefan Kanfer observing: "The two men were diametrical opposites: Marlon required multiple takes; Frank detested repeating himself." Upon their first meeting Sinatra reportedly scoffed, "Don't give me any of that Actors Studio shit." Brando later quipped, "Frank is the kind of guy, when he dies, he's going to heaven and give God a hard time for making him bald." Frank Sinatra called Brando "the world's most overrated actor", and referred to him as "mumbles".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://listverse.com/2014/06/07/10-strange-stories-about-frank-sinatra/|title=10 Strange Stories About Frank Sinatra|author=Nolan Moore|date=June 7, 2014|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170202103130/http://listverse.com/2014/06/07/10-strange-stories-about-frank-sinatra/|archive-date=February 2, 2017}}</ref> The film was commercially though not critically successful, costing $5.5&nbsp;million to make and grossing $13&nbsp;million.{{citation needed|date=August 2014}}

Brando played Sakini, a Japanese interpreter for the U.S. Army in postwar Japan, in ''[[The Teahouse of the August Moon (film)|The Teahouse of the August Moon]]'' (1956). [[Pauline Kael]] was not particularly impressed by the movie, but noted "Marlon Brando starved himself to play the pixie interpreter Sakini, and he looks as if he's enjoying the stunt—talking with a mad accent, grinning boyishly, bending forward, and doing tricky movements with his legs. He's harmlessly genial (and he is certainly missed when he's offscreen), though the fey, roguish role doesn't allow him to do what he's great at and it's possible that he's less effective in it than a lesser actor might have been."
[[File:Marlon Brando meets Emperor Haile Selassie I.jpg|thumb|Ethiopian Emperor [[Haile Selassie|Haile Selassie I]] with Brando in the film set of ''[[Désirée (film)|Désirée]]'', (behind) [[Seble Desta|Princess Seble Desta]]]]
In ''[[Sayonara]]'' (1957), Brando appeared as a United States Air Force officer. ''[[Newsweek]]'' found the film a "dull tale of the meeting of the twain", but it was nevertheless a box-office success. According to Stefan Kanfer's biography of the actor, Brando's manager [[Jay Kanter]] negotiated a profitable contract with ten percent of the gross going to Brando, which put him in the millionaire category. The movie was controversial due to openly discussing [[interracial marriage]], but proved a great success, earning 10 Academy Award nominations, with Brando being nominated for Best Actor. The film went on to win four Academy Awards. ''Teahouse'' and ''Sayonara'' were the first in a string of films Brando would strive to make over the next decade which contained socially relevant messages, and he formed a partnership with Paramount to establish his own production company called Pennebaker, its declared purpose to develop films that contained "social value that would improve the world." The name was a tribute in honor of his mother, who had died in 1954. By all accounts, Brando was devastated by her death, with biographer Peter Manso telling [[A&E (TV channel)|A&E]]'s ''[[Biography (TV series)|Biography]]'', "She was the one who could give him approval like no one else could and, after his mother died, it seems that Marlon stops caring." Brando appointed his father to run Pennebaker. In the same A&E special, George Englund claims that Brando gave his father the job because "it gave Marlon a chance to take shots at him, to demean and diminish him".<ref name=A&E/>

In 1958, Brando appeared in ''[[The Young Lions (film)|The Young Lions]]'', dyeing his hair blonde and assuming a German accent for the role, which he later admitted was not convincing. The film is based on the novel by [[Irwin Shaw]], and Brando's portrayal of the character Christian Diestl was controversial for its time. He later wrote, "The original script closely followed the book, in which Shaw painted all Germans as evil caricatures, especially Christian, whom he portrayed as a symbol of everything that was bad about [[Nazism]]; he was mean, nasty, vicious, a cliché of evil&nbsp;... I thought the story should demonstrate that there are no inherently 'bad' people in the world, but they can easily be misled." Shaw and Brando even appeared together for a televised interview with CBS correspondent [[David Schoenbrun]] and, during a bombastic exchange, Shaw charged that, like most actors, Brando was incapable of playing flat-out villainy; Brando responded by stating "Nobody creates a character but an actor. I play the role; now he exists. He is my creation." ''The Young Lions'' also features Brando's only appearance in a film with friend and rival [[Montgomery Clift]] (although they shared no scenes together). Brando closed out the decade by appearing in ''[[The Fugitive Kind]]'' (1960) opposite [[Anna Magnani]]. The film was based on another play by Tennessee Williams but was hardly the success ''A Streetcar Named Desire'' had been, with the ''[[Los Angeles Times]]'' labeling Williams' personae "psychologically sick or just plain ugly" and ''[[The New Yorker]]'' calling it a "cornpone melodrama".{{citation needed|date=July 2020}}