Everybody’s all-American: The posthumous rebranding of Marlon Brando

Abstract

Marlon Brando has been canonized as one of the greatest actors of all time, but the reflections of critics and fans also fixate on the decadence and decline that characterized the final decades of Brando’s life. In the years since his death, the early Brando has resurfaced as the dominant image of Brando’s stardom. In a striking example, a commercial for the Mastercard ‘Priceless’ campaign features footage of Marlon Brando from The Wild One (1953) as the visual complement to the tagline, ‘The perfect pair of jeans-priceless’. This essay uses this commercial as the point of entry for an analysis of Brando’s career and its posthumous reframing, arguing that the endurance of Brando’s celebrity is tied to questions of nationality, masculinity, and class.