At the time of his first impact, Marlon Brando was a joke figure to any cinema-goer who wanted the face on screen to say the words so that they could be understood. Still of a tender age, I was included in the number of those who scorned the Brando mumble, although his physical appeal immediately worked its influence, so that in my slouching attitude and the area of my curled lip I was sometimes hard to distinguish from the original: or so I fancied. Doubts that Brando had any capacity for clear speech whatsoever were cleverly put to rest when he starred as Mark Antony in a Hollywood Julius Caesar directed by Joseph Mankiewicz in 1953. There could be no doubt that John Gielgud and James Mason (as Cassius and Brutus respectively) amounted to an Anglo-voiced double act that left Brando sounding short of aged-in-the-wood sonority.