The upcoming appreciations of Marlon Brando will no doubt focus on The Godfather and A Streetcar Named Desire, but of all the performances that I've ever seen, his performance in Last Tango in Paris remains the greatest of them all, a sometimes rambling, sometimes intensely focused essay on what it means to be a man, or at least on what it meant to be Brando himself, a bum with poetry in his soul, or a poet with the soul of a bum.

It's the kind of performance that still has the power to invade the world beyond the screen and demolish the relationships of the people seated in the audience, as I've learned from personal experience. If the last three decades of Brando's career sometimes seemed like a long, sad retreat from that unguarded revelation of the self, it was arguably a small price to pay for what is, by a wide margin, the most rounded, wounded, complete human being ever captured on film.