Chapter 8 - Performance style, posturing, and camp

Summary

‘Flamboyance’ was a term frequently associated with Brynner's performances: others included ‘strut’ and ‘swagger.’ This vocabulary dates back to his breakthrough in The King and I: ‘As the semibarbaric King, Yul Brynner struts and frets with […] virile swagger’; ‘strikinglooking Yul Brynner […] plays it flamboyantly and aggressively and even “hams” a little, but he injects terrific vitality into the picture.’ The degree of stylization, and indeed hyperbole, involved in many of his onscreen performances was such that, from a contemporary perspective, they can come across as somewhat hammy. This impression is easily supported by the overall artifice of studio-era Hollywood, the overblown hues of Technicolor, and the lavishly designed sets of freely re-imagined historical ships, villages, and abodes where his characters sulked, schemed, and ruled against a backdrop of extras – sometimes hordes of them – building pyramids, fighting decisive battles, and serving up courtly entertainment.

Onscreen, Brynner's body was rigid yet moved with sudden grace, occasionally bursting into song and dance. The accentuated masculinity of his performances remained unaffected by ornate accessories and the occasionally liberal application of makeup which he sported all the way up to Adíos, Sabata of 1970. Despite Newsweek's 1958 declaration that Brynner should simply stick to exotic roles – ‘He could never get away with being the John Wayne/Cooper cowboy; light comedy is definitely out’ – his work expanded across genres from historical and biblical epics to comedies, drama, spy films, Westerns, action, fantasy and sci-fi while nevertheless retaining a readily identifiable – even idiosyncratic – screen presence throughout. This chapter explores Brynner's performance style in terms of its recurrent features, and by zooming in on its embrace of artifice and excess. Starting with a discussion of Brynner's gestural registers and acting techniques in the context of Hollywood's transforming notions of dramatic craft and skill, it moves to considering their limitations through his rather unsuccessful comedy roles, and explores the presence and meanings of camp in his later film work in particular. Throughout, my interest lies in repetitions as the stuff that makes characteristic performance styles.