SOURCE: "Doing Brando," in Film Comment, Vol. 32, No. 1, January-February, 1996, pp. 83-8.

In the following essay, Bush examines the persona of violent male characters in Tarantino's films, especially as derived from earlier crime genre films and performances by Marlon Brando.

Back in the early Fifties, a solid decade before Quentin Tarantino was born into Knoxville, Tennessee poverty, Marlon Brando, young and still hard, was re-surveying the horizon of passion for postwar American men. He carved out low swales of improvisatory naturalism, and shaped patches of dark mumbling where rash and grievous outbursts could feel at home with the new Beat preference for the raw over the cooked. Brando made something of a new Eden of, and for, men. But it was a dark and vexed place mostly, the little light there was fighting through to bowers of mossy sex—a subject that Brando (according to Peter Manso's biography, Brando...