Brando....What is Genius???? I'll define it. A genius "discovers" things that have been there since time began, things that everybody else had passed by. Spinoza once said that God was a triangle. Before there was a universe a triangle had three sides; the angles on those three sides totaled 180 degrees, and the square of the hypotenuse of a right triagle was equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. It has been that way since before time began and will be there after all is gone. Understand that and it's easy to understand God. Pythagoras "discovered" the properties of a right triangle. Euclid, Beethoven, Johnny Mercer, Richard Rogers just got hit with music and ideas. The things just "came to them." Richard Rogers sat down at the piano back stage in Philadelphia when the show "Oklahoma" was a total failure. The song Oklahoma just came to him when a show saving song was needed. Einstein was riding on a streetcar when relativity just came to him. People who knew Richard Rogers said he "talked with God."

Brando was an actor so inventive that things "just came to him". Can you imagine "Streetcar" without him? "The Godfather"? Think of "Apocalypse Now" with somebody else as Kurtz. Could anyone else have exploded onto the screen like he did in "On the Waterfront"?

It's the little things within each role, a scratch of the nose, a nod of the head, the way he said things that stuck in our gut forever after we experienced him. Fifty years later we remember the agony of failure when he told Rod Steiger, "You don't understand! I could have been a contender. I could have had class and been somebody. Real Class. I could have been a contender, instead of a bum, let's face it, which is what I am." People who worked on that movie said the scene was improvised not written.

These things, the way he said them; the way he looked when he said them; the way he communicated everything with the power to affect people like nobody before him made him a genius in the acting field. Like other geniuses he was alone. He was in a place nobody else had ever seen. He still is.