Striking poses: the fantastic figure of Yul Brynner

There stands Rameses, the future Pharaoh of Egypt, back straight, topless except for a cape and heavy ornamental jewellery, glaring at Moses. There the King of Siam sulks and pouts in his palace, decorative silk coat open to reveal an expanse of shaved, muscular torso. There the brash Cossack Taras Bulba, enraged, sleeves up and hairy chest exposed, wields a sword with angular movements. There the Native American Chief Black Eagle impassively yet boldly faces his imprisoners, adorned in loincloth, armbands and a coat of copper-coloured body paint. Up on an island cliff, the savage pirate captain Jonathan Kongre sits mounted on a white horse, clad in black and silver, primed for violence. Dressed in nothing but a towel, the agent Pete Novak prowls a sauna, fixing his gaze on his prey. And there, steadily, a gunslinger killer robot approaches, all in black, with a metallic menace to his eyes.

Spanning more than two decades, these Yul Brynner film performances are built on idiosyncratic bodily stances, gestures and motions. Their displays of alpha masculinity and phallic authority are amplified by the actor’s erect posture, low voice and trademark baldness. Brynner is rigid yet moves with sudden grace, occasionally bursting into song. The accentuated masculinity of his performances remains unaffected by the ornate accessories or the frequently liberal application of face and body makeup. The degree of stylization, and indeed hyperbole, involved in Brynner’s onscreen performances is such that from a contemporary perspective they can easily come across as hammy, or just plain camp. This impression is amplified by the overall artifice of 1950s Hollywood cinema, the overblown hues of Technicolor and the lavishly designed sets of freely reimagined historical ships, villages and royal abodes where his characters sulk, scheme and rule against a backdrop of hordes of extras, variously building pyramids, fighting decisive battles and providing courtly entertainment.

Brynner’s career spanned 1950s Hollywood epics to European co-productions of the 1970s. His star image was markedly flexible in the range of ethnicities it was made to encompass, while remaining unfixed in terms of the actor’s actual origins. Brynner’s elastic positioning within Hollywood’s racial taxonomy meant he was considered appropriate for playing most types except for the well-rounded, corn-fed, all-American hero. This flexibility resonated with, and was supplemented by, his elaborately self-fabricated star image. The diversity of fantastic tales of origin crafted throughout Brynner’s life afforded his screen appearances an additional exotic frisson and mythical aura, even if, by the late 1960s, these stories marked him as anachronistic, with their manifest artificiality gesturing towards the bygone studio era. The same applied to his muscular, gradually ageing body. For although Brynner’s performances had long functioned as invitations to enjoy his bodily splendour, his corporeal aesthetic remained a case apart from what Christopher R. Brown has identified as the increasingly fashionable ‘wiry, untoned, hairy, and sweaty physiques’ of New Hollywood.¹

Brynner’s acting style ranged from markedly theatrical in The King and I (Walter Lang, 1956) to more simplified in The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960), yet even these two appearances shared similar ‘direct movement and almost rigidly upright posture’.² In fact Brynner’s intense physical screen presence – the mere spectacle of the actor himself – routinely eclipsed any nuances of character or displays of emotional depth. Despite the seeming variation in the roles that Brynner played during his career, they were often repetitive and relied on the force and appeal of his screen persona, which Cecil B. DeMille, director of The Ten Commandments (1956), described as ‘a cross between Douglas Fairbanks, Sr, Apollo, and a little bit of Hercules’.³ Actualized as pose, movement, bodily manner, voice and accent, Brynner’s onscreen presence cut across his oeuvre as a kind of reverberation. This notion of ‘reverb’ is key to understanding his contemporaneous appeal, and may also explain some of the disinterest with which his work has since been met.

The ‘fantastic figure’ in my title refers to Brynner’s star image, as manifest in biographical accounts, interviews, publicity materials and cinematic performances. It also foregrounds the aesthetics, physicality and materiality of his body in its various onscreen iterations over the years. In what follows, I explore this figure in terms of its fabrication, flexibility and reappearance; my interest in Brynner’s flamboyantly pan-ethnic performances concerns less his style of acting than the overall manner and style of his presence. In his discussion of the Hollywood extra, Will Straw conceptualizes cinema as an archive of gestures, presence, performance styles, specific faces and bodies, as well as their transformation over time.⁴ Applying a similar approach to the performances of a lead actor such as Brynner allows analytical emphasis to shift from their function in diegesis and narrative to the repetitive and flexible aspects of bodily display as significant elements in their own right. Starting with a discussion of the key components of Brynner’s pan-ethnic star image, I then address his positioning as a sex symbol in 1950s Hollywood, the aesthetics of his recurrent poses and motions, their flexibility in terms of cosmopolitanism and ethnic drag, as well as the ways in which they are currently remembered and replayed on online platforms.

Even though Brynner appeared in comedies, spy thrillers and dramas with characteristic panache over a film career spanning from 1949 to 1976, performances as kings, rulers, warriors, captains and gunslingers form the essence of his star image as it was established between 1956 and 1960. Brynner remains most associated with his role as King Mongkut in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The King and I, both onscreen and off, a role for which he won Academy and Tony awards, and which he performed on stage over 4600 times. The kingly trope continues in biographical overviews of his life, from the books The Inscrutable King and The Man Who Would Be King, to the 1995 television documentary The Man Who Was King and even the 1983 Yul Brynner Cookbook: Food Fit for the King and You.⁵ These royal connotations echo Brynner’s own, blatantly mythical tales of origin.

My true name is Taidge Khan, Jr […] The blood of Ghengis Khan flows through my veins … My father was a leading adviser to the Czar … I ran away from home at age thirteen to join the circus … I have a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne … The money I earn from acting helps support my destitute gypsy family.

So began Brynner’s introduction to the journalist, and later biographer, Jhan Robbins.⁶ In another variation, his mother was a Romanian gypsy who was sometimes said to have died giving birth.⁷ Brynner’s proclivity for stories of mythic origins was already well acknowledged during his rise to stardom, as shown in a Behind the Scenes article from 1957 (figure 1):

When this angular-faced, amber-eyed, flat-nosed Mongolian mountebank opens his mouth, anything is liable to come out of his mouth – and usually does […] At a swanky cocktail party in New York’s theatrical district […] Yul described a childhood of Oriental splendor in a palace in Outer Mongolia, surrounded by dusky slaves and voluptuous, slant-eyed dancing girls. ‘It was natural for me to play the role of the king in The King and I’, says Yul. ‘I learned about being a king at a very early age’.⁸

In a 1959 French television interview, the journalist Pierre Dumayet inquired which of the dozen or so stories of origin then in circulation the actor himself preferred. With obvious glee, Brynner responded that his favourite was the one identifying him as a Swiss-Mongolian born in Brooklyn: ‘C’est magnifique’. Richly embellished origin stories, combined with inventive artist names, would not have been a particular novelty in Hollywood, where fantastic personalities had been freely adopted as a means of amplifying star glamour ever since the studios were established in the 1920s. By the time Brynner ascended to stardom, foreign origins, both actual and fabricated, had long held erotic allure while simultaneously constraining careers in multiple ways.

Fig. 1.

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Picture used to illustrate the Behind the Scenes article (1957).

Theodosia Goodman of Cincinnati, for example, had been ‘transformed by Fox studio publicity into mysterious Theda Bara, daughter of an Arabian princess and an Italian sculptor, raised in “the shadow of the Sphinx”’.⁹ Bara, daughter of Polish and Swiss immigrants, was refashioned into the quintessential foreign vamp of early cinema, while Rudolph Valentino’s contemporaneous sex appeal was rooted in his Italian origins. Examining Valentino’s star image, Gaylyn Studlar positions it within ‘a wider web of popular discourses that linked the exotic to the erotic in forging a contradictory sexual spectacle of male ethnic otherness within a xenophobic and nativist culture’.¹⁰ As Ernesto Chávez notes, since the 1920s each ‘national and ethnic group had its part in Hollywood’s racial and racist script’¹¹ in ways that resulted in both stereotypical depiction and typecasting that locked performers into specific lines of roles. In some instances, the star’s ethnic reinvention was a means to undo difference and to allow for flexibility in casting. Perhaps the most famous example is that of Margarita Cansino being recreated as Rita Hayworth, the ‘American love goddess’.¹²

Brynner’s self-invention followed these patterns of artifice, yet in a somewhat idiosyncratic manner. His star image was not the product of studio publicity for the reason that its basic elements had been laid out during his Broadway career, launched with the 1945 Lute Song where he played a character of ‘Oriental quality’, and followed by the stage success of The King and I in 1951.¹³ In addition, Brynner was not under exclusive contract for any studio but worked with Fox, Paramount, MGM and United Artists between 1956 and 1958 alone. By the mid 1950s, obviously fabricated stories of dramatic and romantic origins, popular from the 1920s to the 1940s, held less sway as film acting was framed increasingly as a craft and less as a case of unique star personality radiating its glow on film.¹⁴

Both the range and fantastic quality of Brynner’s origin stories suggest that he had little investment in actually being believed. Yet even his ostensibly factual biography had more than a faint streak of romance to it. Born in 1920 as Yuliy Briner in Vladivostok, close to the Chinese and Korean borders, and of Russian, Mongolian, German and Swiss ancestry, he spent his formative years in Russia, China and France. Before emigrating to New York with his mother in 1940, Brynner worked in Paris as a trapeze artist in the Cirque d’hiver and as singer in a Roma cabaret, brushing shoulders with Jean Cocteau’s circle of artists and celebrities.¹⁵ Within 1950s American culture, Brynner, in his son’s words, ‘almost constituted a new species. Even his name was a mystery: one cannot confidently guess from which continent those three syllables emerged, for they are neither European nor Oriental.’¹⁶ The fluidity, inner contradictions and excess of Brynner’s autobiographical stories hindered any attempt to pinpoint his ethnic or national origins, instead rendering the issue one best guessed at. This allowed him to overcome being typecast as that which he demonstrably was: a first-generation Soviet-Russian immigrant. Brynner’s cross-continental, polyglot background functioned as springboard for his later self-fashioning as a cosmopolitan man of the world who, by implication, could take on the role of virtually any man in the world.

Firmly tapping into the Hollywood trope of eroticized and orientalized exotic male otherness, Brynner’s artificial and malleable self-representation primed his applicability to roles covering a broad ethnic spectrum. Like George Chakiris, who played the son of a Mayan ruler in Kings of the Sun (J. Lee Thompson, 1963), and Rita Moreno, who was cast as Tuptim the Burmese slave girl in The King and I, Brynner, white yet possibly not entirely so, was a desirable studio-era proxy for performers whose explicit racial otherness prevented them from being cast in leading roles. Brynner’s onscreen body was Thai in The King and I, Ukrainian in Taras Bulba (J. Lee Thompson, 1962), Yugoslav in Battle of Neretva (Veljko Bulajić, 1969), Russian in Anastasia (Anatole Litvak, 1956), The Brothers Karamazov (Richard Brooks, 1957) and The Journey (Anatole Litvak, 1959), Indian in The Long Duel (Ken Annakin, 1967), Mexican in Villa Rides (Buzz Kulik, 1968) and Adíos, Sabata (Frank Kramer, 1970), French in The Buccaneer (Anthony Quinn, 1958), Egyptian in The Ten Commandments (figure 2), Arab in Escape from Zahrain (Ronald Neame, 1962), Israeli in Solomon and Sheba (King Vidor, 1959) and Cast a Giant Shadow (Melville Shavelson, 1966), and German in Morituri (Bernhard Wicki, 1965) and Triple Cross (Terence Young, 1966).

Fig. 2.

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Yul Brynner as Rameses in The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956).

When Brynner’s characters were American they came in an equally diverse range of ethnic hues, as his body was figured as Native American in Kings of the Sun, Cajun in The Magnificent Seven and Invitation to a Gunfighter (Richard Wilson, 1964), Japanese-American in Flight from Ashiya (Michael Anderson, 1964), Italian-American in Port of New York (László Benedek, 1949) and Death Rage (Antonio Margheriti, 1976), Greek-American in Surprise Package (Stanley Donen, 1960) and French-American in The Sound and the Fury (Martin Ritt, 1959). On some occasions – in his roles as the secret service agent Pete Novak in The File of the Golden Goose (Sam Wanamaker, 1969) or as CIA agent in The Double Man (Franklin J. Shaffner, 1967) – no specific explanation was given for his accent, which Noël Coward once characterized as ‘rhythmical Americanese marinated in borscht’.¹⁷

Starting from this accent, the sense of the unspecified alien was central to Brynner’s star image in ways that created both opportunities and obvious constraints: ‘His muscular body and exotic accent were unique but at the same time limiting […] He was not “an average clean-cut Mongolian kid” as he often joked. In fact, producers and directors never thought to cast him in conventional roles.’¹⁸ As far back as the late 1950s Brynner noted, in his French television interview, that Hollywood tended to create formulas for its stars: ‘And I think that the formula towards which I was most pushed was to play a type that is extremely hard, even mean, with a heart of gold. And that can become very boring.’ As the years progressed and the studio era drew to a close, as his stardom faded and his roles grew less flamboyant in their ethnic displays, sets and scale, Brynner remained cast in hypermasculine roles that were short on playfulness or depth and increasingly rife with violence. Some of these characters had hearts of gold while others failed to have any hearts whatsoever.

In addition to spy thrillers, Brynner’s later film work featured him as Captain Kongre in The Light at the Edge of the World (Kevin Billington, 1971), as a postapocalyptic fighter in The Ultimate Warrior (Robert Clouse, 1975), as a mysterious blackmailer in Fuzz (Richard A. Colla, 1972), and as a robot in Westworld (Michael Crichton, 1973) and Futureworld (Richard T. Heffron, 1976). The two robot appearances built on his well-known roles as black-hatted gunslingers in The Magnificent Seven, Invitation to a Gunfighter and Return of the Seven (Burt Kennedy, 1966), reconfigured in machine guise (figure 3). Unlike these previous characters, the robot in Westworld has no depth or function beyond that with which it has been programmed – to perform in a theme park with the purpose of giving paying guests the pleasure of shooting it down. As the robot begins to malfunction, its single purpose instead becomes to kill. The robot’s mechanical motions and upright posture could be interpreted as a comment on the degree to which Brynner had repeatedly used such gestures and poses when playing the emotionally reserved and technically superior gunslingers for over two decades. More accurately, perhaps, it may be that Brynner’s stylized bodily presence afforded Westworld much of its appeal precisely because of this reverb.

Fig. 3.

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Brynner as the black-hatted robot killer in Westworld (Michael Crichton, 1973).

In the sequel, Futureworld, the previously terminated killer robot reappears in a female protagonist’s dream. Fixing his shimmering metal eyes upon her, a slight smile playing on his lips, the robot is both a figure of predatory menace and, as the scene proceeds, an object of female sexual desire – his eyes implying a different kind of intent as the two fall into a passionate embrace. The altered state of reality afforded by a dream sequence balances the threat of death with sensuous bliss and menace with desire, transforming the killer machine into something of a sex robot. In doing so, the scene brings together the elements of physical force, strangeness and sex appeal that were all elementary building blocks of Brynner’s star image.

Brynner may have posed full frontal for George Platt Lynes’s homoerotic photographic nudes early in his career, yet his star image was established as that of a staunchly and solidly heterosexual, insatiably virile Casanova. Heterosexual appeal and prowess surfaced as central to Brynner’s star image around the same time as his fantastic narratives of origin – and in equally mythical manner. In its 1957 exposé, Behind the Scenes magazine explored his habits of myth-making: ‘According to Yul, who looks upon his boudoir battles as no more than the due of his invincible charm, the time he has spent horizontally occupied would have killed an ordinary man’.¹⁹ Quoting Deborah Kerr, Brynner’s co-star in The King and I, on his ‘oodles of sex appeal’, the article continues to address the difficulty of telling the man from the myth:

Every one of Brynner’s friends has a different story to tell about Yul and his exploits, and the different versions have only one thing in common – they all invest Yul with the charm of a Don Juan, the strength of a Samson, and the morals of a tomcat.²⁰

Brynner’s biographies are similarly rife with tales of sexual adventure, with lovers ranging from iconic female Hollywood stars to his four wives and an additional league of extramarital partners. An anonymous lover is quoted, detailing his ‘animal magnetism’:

he took complete command the moment he walked into a room. He didn’t look at you – he stared at you. When you looked into his eyes you felt you had gone back centuries. It was as if a spell had suddenly been cast on you.²¹

Another source attests to his ‘unknown quality that makes you instantly want to surrender’, while Brynner’s son describes him as a ‘sex symbol, the masculine counterpart to Marilyn Monroe’.²²

Brynner’s star image was charged with a physical energy, animal insatiability and carnal appetite that went well beyond the sexual. A Redbook article following the release of The King and I addressed his gastronomic habits in fascinated, incredulous tones:

This is the fabulous Yul Brynner […] who is being widely hailed as the most exciting male on the screen since Rudolph Valentino […] His breakfast consists of a large steak, sometimes two, washed down with coffee. Before nine o’clock, tigerish hunger smites him again and he tides himself over until 12 o’clock lunch with a few large meat sandwiches. For lunch he has chops, steak, turkey, or roast beef and this may get him by until two o’clock when he sends out for sandwiches and cake.²³

Excess and penchant for bodily pleasure, in short, was never far away in the construction of Brynner’s fantastic figure.

Mark Gallagher conceptualizes cinematic sex appeal as dependent on the ‘exposure and display of the body, as well as on a range of performative signs that comprise his or her idiolect’. Sex appeal involves a set of traits repeated, highlighted and recognized across an actor’s body of work, and possibly showcased or magnified through technical, narrative and tonal means.²⁴ Sex appeal results from bodily work and, as a component of star image, can be bolstered through narrative accounts and descriptions of both the performer and his or her performances, as found in the myriad accounts of Brynner’s animal, primitive, mesmerizing or barbaric magnetism. Yet sex appeal alone does not a sex symbol make. Will Scheibel defines a sex symbol as a ‘celebrity image that derives its dominant meaning and affect from sex’. A sex symbol entails a kind of truncation, whereby sex overshadows the other characteristics and features that an actor may have, the degrees of thespian craft included.²⁵ Furthermore, John Mercer points out that a sex symbol is ‘a symbol (or perhaps more accurately a synecdoche) for prevalent attitudes towards sex’, and hence a matter of cultural norms and values:

So rather than the assumption that sex symbols exist merely because they are ‘sexy’, it is rather more that specific celebrities are (or become) containers into which sets of meanings and anxieties around sex and sexuality can be poured, or a metaphorical surface on to which desires can be projected.²⁶

Like Valentino’s sex-saturated star image some decades earlier, Brynner’s was foreign in ways that set him apart from his contemporaries by ‘promising the danger and excitement of everything that was uncommon’.²⁷ Unlike Valentino, however, he was not cast in the role of romantic lover, and many of his characters with more or less pronounced amorous intent – from King Mongkut to Rameses, and the dandy Jules Gaspard d’Estaing in Invitation to a Gunfighter – died in the narrative closure. Steeped in myth, cosmopolitanism, exoticism and orientalism from the outset, Brynner’s star image framed him as ‘imported goods’, operating with a different kind of logic – and constraint – than that governing the lives of ‘regular’ Americans. In terms of physical performance, this image was built on an unabashed display of bodily wares as well as on stylized poses complete with taut muscles and a hard, fixed stare. Whether adorned in elaborately decorated oriental costumes of silks and pelts, the elegant apparel of a Cajun gunfighter or little else but a loincloth, his body was designed to stand out.

Although for several roles he was equipped with a toupee, a clean-shaven head was probably Brynner’s most singular striking physical feature. Baldness set him apart from his fellow actors and rendered him instantly recognizable on the pages of any film magazine. His baldness was also extensively used as visual element in film posters and referenced in articles that sometimes engaged in wordplay to further highlight the state of his hairstyle. In the overblown phrasing of a biographer, Brynner ‘had the amazing capacity to transform his baldness from a common blemish into an outstanding trademark. Suddenly, after a razor cut, Yul Brynner became one of the sexiest actors in film history, representing the most authentic and irresistible image of masculinity.’²⁸ There are few Hollywood parallels until the more recent careers of Ben Kingsley, Patrick Stewart, Bruce Willis, Dwayne Johnson or Vin Diesel. Eric von Stroheim performed bald, as well as with hair, but his star image was never that of an oriental seducer or a man of action; rather he was recurrently cast as a European aristocrat. Telly Savalas, whose career picked up in the 1960s, became known not only for his baldness but also for his low voice and macho action roles. While some of these had flamboyant traits reminiscent of Brynner’s exotic bluster, Savalas’s fame remained on the more modest scale of B-movies and television work.

It was certainly not only the dome of Brynner’s head that was so avidly displayed. From the 1950s studio epics to his late work, his onscreen performances feature more bared chest than historical accuracy or narrative logic, no matter how fragile, would seem to demand, including a topless shaving scene in The Brothers Karamazov and a short series of sauna scenes in The Double Man. His characters frequently appear topless when fighting, often with no particular explanation. In some instances (The Ten Commandments, The King and I, Kings of the Sun), his chest was shaved ‘to facilitate the applications of oils and enhance its musculature’.²⁹ Makeup was, of course, also central to his diverse make-up to performances of ethnicity and accentuated exoticism. These corporeal displays did not end, or even decrease, as Brynner became older, and at the age of fifty-five he fought bare-chested through much of the title role of The Ultimate Warrior. In his first scene, the warrior stands topless, two thick leather belts tight on his waist, immobile above a group of men who have come to request his services. Shot from below, Brynner, at 1.73 metres tall, towers as a monument of masculine force on which people depend for their survival, saying not a word himself. Our first sight of this body moving is when it takes on and defeats a band of attackers.

Brynner’s oeuvre belongs to genres that Ina Rae Hark describes as featuring men in conflict with other men, and that episodically make the male protagonist’s body into a spectacle: ‘Westerns, epics, swashbucklers, science fiction, sword and sorcery, war dramas, gangster and cop movies’.³⁰ Within these genres, displays of male flesh have offered visual gratification to viewers of diverse gender identifications and sexual orientations throughout film history. Yet the 1950s witnessed a notable range of white American leading men – from Kirk Douglas to Charlton Heston to Burt Lancaster – taking off their shirts in order to exhibit their muscles.³¹ This involved Douglas being cast as a Greek hero in Ulysses (Mario Camerini and Mario Bava, 1954), as a Nordic warrior in The Vikings (Richard Fleischer, 1958) and as a Roman slave gladiator in Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, 1960). Heston played both Moses in The Ten Commandments and a Judaic prince/gladiator slave in Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959), while Lancaster’s roles included an Italian archer hero in The Flame and the Arrow (Jacques Tourneur, 1950) and a Native American warrior in Apache (Robert Aldrich, 1954). All these performances relied on the centrality of the spectacle of the muscular, agile and athletic white male body posturing for the camera. Like Brynner, these actors were able to occupy a range of foreign and exotic roles; unlike him, they achieved this without being constrained by those same roles.

As Hark points out, films have focused on the spectacle of the exposed muscular white body in scenes not only of combat but also of torture and humiliation, providing motivation for both the action and for the camera’s fixation on displayed male flesh. This has afforded a solution to what Mercer identifies as the enigma of the male sex symbol’s desirability – ‘a puzzle that has to be worked out or made sense of in some kind of way’.³² This ‘working out’ has involved the sexualization of male bodies as indices of masculinity and markers of virility in the guise of violence and humour, as well as the heterosexualization of these bodies in order to ward off any queer connotations arising from their display. It is nevertheless central that no threat, harm or violence, let alone humour, was required to justify the scenes revelling in Brynner’s corporeal assets. His gratuitous displays of bodily bulk, strength and skill, and their frequent setting within the historical epic, all chime with the aesthetics of peplum but are not confined within it.³³ With the notable exception of a lingering scene in Kings of the Sun, in which Brynner is seen writhing near-naked in body paint, injured, imprisoned and tied to the floor, his was not a body to be thrown into a gladiator pit, lashed with a whip or sold into slavery, as was repeatedly the case with Douglas and Heston. Brynner’s off-white characters were more likely to be the rulers ordering and overseeing such operations. In Taras Bulba it was inevitable that the son, played by Tony Curtis, and not the father, played by Brynner, would be the one to suffer flagellation at the hands of Polish clergy.

Once a star of considerable fame and stature, Brynner has long since shifted to the more obscure realms of film history. Making a brief comeback from this fog of oblivion in a 2013 New York Times article on how posture affects people’s moods and impressions, Brynner resurfaced as the master of authoritative pose:

John Neffinger, a consultant to aspiring politicians and business leaders, advises spreading arms and legs to form an X like Yul Brynner in ‘The King and I’ before any stressful situation […] ‘We’ve seen posing make a tremendous difference in people’s presentation and performance’, he said. ‘It gives you a boost of testosterone’.³⁴

Brynner first introduced this pose – exuding authority, masculinity and control, and arguably male sex hormone – in The Ten Commandments, to express Rameses’ aggressive, intense and authoritative persona. In a scene following a conflict with his father, the Pharaoh, and his brother Moses, Rameses stands stiffly still in this pose as other characters gesture and the camera moves closer. Brynner’s statuesque stillness against the fluttering background accentuates Rameses’ visual and narrative centrality. As Rameses begins to move and speak of his plans and lust for power, he does so rigidly, keeping his hands at his hips and maintaining his grimly pouting facial register. In his discussion of male sex symbols, Mercer argues that each has a ‘defining performance, emblematic moment or (and probably most importantly) an iconic image that “symbolises” sex-symbol status’.³⁵ In the case of Brynner, it would probably be this pose, which shortly after its introduction found its most recognizable iteration in The King and I: hands on hips, legs apart, chin up, brows furrowed, glaring, topless, with muscles tensed (figure 4). As a stylized display of masculine assertiveness, the pose encapsulates much of Brynner’s performance style and star image. Repeated throughout his career, it solidified him as a statue of flesh that, however vibrant, virile and agile his character might be, so often stood stock still while the world literally moved around him.

Fig. 4.

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Brynner’s signature pose in The King and I (Walter Lang, 1956).

If, following Straw, the film extra functions as ‘graphic detail or as expressive human body’,³⁶ then a lead actor would be the embodied cinematic centrepiece and highlight. As background, extras and supporting actors afford stars much of their extraordinary presence onscreen.³⁷ The issue is one of ‘scales of presence’, where extras, as filmic ornament, become dissolved ‘within a film’s broader organization of graphic lines and shapes’ as ‘part of the rippling of graphic information outwards from a scene’s central characters’.³⁸ In contrast, Brynner’s frequently exposed and lavishly adorned body was showcased as a spectacle, or at least as a noteworthy sight, on which attention turns and fixates. His bodily presence dominated scenes in an independently spectacular vein.

Consider another scene from The Ten Commandments, where Heston’s Moses occupies the visual foreground, topless, in chains, his tall and muscular body glistening with perspiration, while Brynner’s Rameses stands behind. Of the two, Heston’s body is the more exposed and bulky, and both actors are cast in roles far detached from their own origins. Born in Wilmette, Illinois, Heston is as unlikely a choice for an Israelite prophet as the Siberian-born Brynner is for an Egyptian prince. Heston’s trademark husky Americanness nevertheless translated as a lack of explicit sex appeal, which, despite any bodily display, was fitting enough for a religious leader. Within this particular scene, visual attention travels towards Rameses, notably shorter and of a smaller frame, dressed in an elaborate, shiny gold-plated skirt, golden armbands and ornate headpiece, one foot on a stair to create an impression of additional length and authority. Both men stand still with their legs apart, muscles tense, Brynner’s motions stiff as he whisks their mutual love interest Nefertiri (Anne Baxter) aside (figure 5). This angularity and force of movement, combined with the statuesque stillness of his erect body and grim facial expression, conveys masculine assertiveness and power independent of the makeup, heavy body ornament and extravagantly decorated couture.

Fig. 5.

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Charlton Heston, Brynner and Anne Baxter in The Ten Commandments.

Brynner’s trademark power pose found many further iterations in The King and I. Shirtless beneath a blue silk jacket with rich gold trimming, the king stands with his legs apart, hands on hips, brow furrowed, a living statue with chest bared; in gold-embroidered red silks he reclines, sings and then strikes the pose again, still shirtless; argumentative, he stands defiant in pale-brown silk with elaborate golden embroidery, or in full red and gold regalia complete with a cap and golden slippers. When the king dances, he does so with an exaggerated, aggressive stomping energy that leaves his partner breathless. A New York Herald Tribune review of the film observed Brynner’s notably corporeal performance style:

It is Brynner who gives the movie its animal spark […] He is every inch the Oriental king, from eloquent fingers that punctuate his commands to the sinewy legs and bare feet with which he stalks about the palace, like an impatient leopard.

His eyes glower with imperial rage, they widen with boyish curiosity, they dance with amusement at his own simple jokes, and on his death couch they are heavy with resignation and accumulated wisdom. This is a rare bit of acting – Brynner is the king, and you don’t forget it for a second.³⁹

Brynner won the Academy Award for best actor with this extravagantly stylized performance of a tyrannical yet childlike oriental ruler who expresses his thoughts and feelings in the form of song and dance – and in doing so he beat Douglas in Lust for Life (Vincente Minnelli, 1956), Laurence Olivier in Richard III (Laurence Olivier, 1955), and both James Dean and Rock Hudson in Giant (George Stevens, 1956). Brynner was a trained stage actor, yet traces of his skill are not particularly evident in the statuesque posing, theatrics and repetitions that punctuate his onscreen performances. Whatever the role, his performance style was quickly recognizable and rarely subtle. It blended acting with appearing and the role with presence, largely since much of the creative expression occurred through bodily stance, gesture and motion. Physical technique and movement vocabulary are standard features of any actor’s skillset, yet Brynner’s style was more intense than most.

A New York Times review for the musical’s 1977 Broadway revival notes that

Yul Brynner is a great actor – or at the very least a great acting presence – not because of what he does but because of what he is. He strides the stage caught in the invisible spotlight of his own personality. He gestures, articulates, and moves with the certainty of an automaton and the grace of a dancer.⁴⁰

There are two ways, at least, to interpret this: that the actor has, over many years of repetition, internalized the role to the degree that it has become his second skin; or that the performance primarily involves the actor taking pleasure in showcasing himself. Regardless of which interpretation one opts for, the gap between the performance and the actor clearly seems to have closed, if not disappeared altogether. Iconic performances in which star image is not so much subordinate to the demands of characterization as threatens to overwhelm them, or where the two modes become hard to tell apart,⁴¹ typify Brynner’s portrayal of the king and indeed his work more broadly. As argued above, with few exceptions his roles were both animated by and subsumed in idiosyncratic motions and gestures, while his screen presence overshadowed that of other performers – and not simply when he was in the centre of the frame.

In 1969 Brynner made a short cameo drag appearance as a torch singer in Peter Sellers’s The Magic Christian. The scene shows Brynner in a futuristic bar, glamorously made up, wearing a blonde wig, a large crystal diamante necklace and a pale yellow silky dress, with noticeable breasts. This blonde first fixes her eyes on Roman Polanski and softly inquires, ‘do you want to buy a girl a drink, big boy?’ (figure 6). Sipping on her cocktail, still focusing her seductive attention on Polanski (‘here’s looking at you, mister’) and gently stroking him with a gloved hand, she then moves into a brief yet highly emotional rendition of Mad About the Boy. As the song swells, she moves around the bar before lifting her hand to her forehead in a final, studied gesture of despair. The singer’s dramatically pained expression suddenly stills into a macho stare as she tugs off her wig, and the adoring eyes of the men around her shift into expressions of horror as they witness the baldness beneath. One of the men exclaims ‘oh, no!’, and as the singer replies ‘oh, yes’, it is clear that the actress Miriam Karlin’s dubbed voice has been replaced by Brynner’s own recognizable, low intonation. End of cameo.

Fig. 6.

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Brynner and Roman Polanski in The Magic Christian (Peter Sellers, 1969).

As Brown points out, Mad About the Boy

references the erotic appeal of male stardom (‘on the silver screen / he melts my foolish heart in every single scene’) to women, but also to men: the song has homosexual connotations, having originally been written and recorded by Noël Coward as a love song to another man.⁴²

Dramatically singing of love for a boy on ‘the silver screen’, Brynner would have also been serenading his own erotic star appeal. Operating in a decidedly different gestural register than Brynner’s other roles that year – Yugoslav partisan in Battle of Neretva and US agent in The File of the Gold Goose – this playful take on the masculine star image is undoubtedly the most remarkable evidence of flexibility in his performance style. That the scene succeeds is due not only to its achievements in dress, makeup and lip-synch, but to the chasm separating Brynner’s customary poses, gestures, motions and expressions from the torch singer’s smooth, soft, yet a little heavy body language as she leans on the bar, fondles her hair, focuses her eyes on and casually caresses other patrons. It also brings to the foreground the humour that ripples through many of Brynner’s screen appearances in the form of smirks, amused looks and over-the-top gestures.

At this point in his career, being positioned as an object of desire – male or female, queer or straight – would hardly have been a novelty for Brynner. With the exception of a handful of commercially unsuccessful comedies and dramas, his roles had involved demonstrations of physical force and skill performed within the gestural registers of masculine bravado and a broad spectrum of ethnic accents. Brynner’s onscreen cross-dressing may have been limited to one scene in The Magic Christian, but his work was certainly rich in instances of ethnic drag – even if the main prop involved was usually the actor’s own body. In one film after another Brynner was positioned as an object to behold – even as an animal force of some kind, both fascinating and fearsome in his unpredictability, dominance and violence. And, as noted above, his cosmopolitan, decidedly alien figure occupied a compromised position in the registers of whiteness, in ways that aided its ornamental, sexualized display yet limited its scope of available roles. As Hollywood film culture transformed, as different body aesthetics were pushed to the fore and as Brynner himself aged, these options grew even more limited and predictable.

In its cosmopolitanism, Brynner’s star image bore some resemblance to that of the Egyptian-born Omar Sharif, whose appearance as Sherif Ali in Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) occasioned his transition from Middle Eastern film stardom to roles in Hollywood and European co-productions. While Brynner, as Rameses, was the Pharaoh of Egypt, Sharif played Russian in Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965) and The Tamarind Seed (Blake Edwards, 1974), and while Brynner envisioned himself as a direct descendant of the Mongol ruler, Sharif was cast in the title role of Ghengis Khan (Henry Levin, 1965). At and after the end of the studio era, Sharif acted in range of exotic and foreign roles similar to those played by Brynner, from the King of Armenia in The Fall of the Roman Empire (Antony Mann, 1964) to a German major in The Night of the Generals (Anatole Litvak, 1967), the Crown Prince of Austria in Mayerling (Terence Young, 1968), a Mexican outlaw in Mackenna’s Gold (J. Lee Thompson, 1969), a guerrilla leader in Che! (Richard Fleischer, 1969), an Afghan in The Horsemen (John Frankenheimer, 1971) and an Arab prince in Ashanti (Richard Fleischer, 1979). There was little commonality in the two actors’ performance styles or physical aesthetics, yet their star images were both malleably exotic, solidly masculine and cosmopolitan in ways that led to them being cast as foreigners and as diversely racialized others. Portraying first one ethnicity then another, the onscreen bodies of both Brynner and Sharif functioned as shifting, fantastic and highly unstable signifiers of ‘cultural uniqueness of nations and ethnicities’.⁴³

The cosmopolitanism central to both men’s star image involved the capacity to cross geographical and cultural boundaries with apparent ease, as well as to occupy a range of positions without being bound to any one in particular – those connected to their national origins included. The flexibility of this ethnic casting found direct correlation in the international mobility of the actors themselves. Born in the Soviet Union, Brynner had a Swiss passport, was a long-term resident of France, and was a naturalized US citizen from 1943 to 1965 (before giving up his citizenship for tax reasons). He regularly played aloof men of the world with a sophisticated taste in dress, art and cuisine, concurring with his star image as a cosmopolitan, polyglot, gourmand womanizer with a penchant for designer clothing. The cosmopolitanism that Brynner performed was not that of a seasoned tourist but suggestive of a deeper mastery of cultural nuance based on extensive social connections and diverse family roots, facilitating instinctual insight into the intricacies of manner, habit, sensibility and style.

Particularly illustrative in this respect are his introductions to the sections of The Yul Brynner Cookbook that feature his favourite recipes from Russian, Japanese, Gypsy, Swiss, Chinese, French and Thai cuisines. While detailing Brynner’s personal connections to the food cultures in question, the introductions also provide brief sociohistorical sketches of each culinary and agricultural context. These contextual and factual vignettes, as well as their ample ‘insider’ recommendations for dishes and drinks, are lodged in Brynner’s experiences and memories, from the Northern Chinese ‘chiao tze’ dumplings reminiscent of his childhood, to the love of fondue handed down from his father and the appreciation for Gypsy food culture inherited from his mother. ‘I have worked and travelled all over the world’, Brynner states, going on to reveal:

Of all the places I’ve been the country that captured my heart more than any other was France. I love the combination of gracious cosmopolitan elegance and ageless charm of gentle rural beauty that I have found in Normandy, the province where I maintain my real home.⁴⁴

Encompassing constant, easy mobility and a broad mastery of, and affective affinity with, global cultures, Brynner outlines an elegant and effortless kind of cosmopolitanism. As such it is not entirely continuous, or easy to pair, with his elaborate, stylized onscreen performances as brash Cossacks and impervious alien rulers, which convey little nuanced insight into the cultural settings that they claim to depict. There is a characteristic, drag-like excess to Brynner’s ethnic performances, which dates them in unfavourable ways. The antiquated air of his historical epics and the flamboyance of his performances are unlikely to invite much contemporary recognition of cinematic artistry. But just as Brynner’s performance style, or his mere corporeal presence, was often the key attraction in his films, these factors may have more longevity than most of the films themselves. To the degree that Brynner is currently remembered, it is in terms of his bodily style and overall look.

One example of Brynner’s presence – or afterlife – in contemporary media culture relates to the heterogeneous, ever-growing archives of YouTube videos, which include not only his films but edited clips and moments selected to communicate something more specific about the film, Brynner himself or some other issue entirely. There are fan tributes as well as archival materials to explore, from television interviews to game-show appearances, his famous posthumous anti-smoking ads, Academy Award acceptance speech, film trailers, dance and performance scenes. One can watch a video composed of every time someone says ‘Moses’ in The Ten Commandments, the drag scene in The Magic Christian, the semi-naked imprisonment scene in the Kings of the Sun, selected highlights from The Ultimate Warrior, Westworld and Futureworld, as well as the scene from The File of the Gold Goose where Brynner’s character meanders through London’s sauna establishments, seeking out his quarry.

This contingent mass of data speaks of what people find worthy of sharing – independent of the limitations of copyright – for the purposes of titillation, appreciation, amusement, obscurity and commentary alike. If camp overtones emerge in many of the Brynner videos uploaded on YouTube, then animated GIFs crafted from these clips, usually just a few seconds long, further decontextualize the materials deployed and focus attention on their specific detail (see figure 7). In their perpetually looping motion, GIFs are based on repetition and hence afford a particular isolation and accentuation of singular gestures, postures and movements. This isolation makes it possible for them to capture and condense some of the gestural repertoires that define individual performance styles as expressions, motions and poses. In doing so they both extend and alter the storage capacities of cinema as an archive of gestures and their transformations.⁴⁵

Fig. 7.

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Google Image Search results for ‘Yul Brynner animated GIFs’, March 2019.

Browsing through Brynner GIFs makes it possible to understand what it is in his performances that grabs people, in the sense of attracting attention, interest and focus, as well as what it is that people grab from these performances by further editing the data.⁴⁶ This appropriation stresses some of the actor’s more idiosyncratic characteristics and, predictably, his best-known performances. At the same time, these characteristics are reframed as enactments of mood, motion and style cut loose from narrative framework, character construction or the broader representational dynamics of any single film. Should the actors or films not be correctly identified, the GIFs remain freely applicable to conveying sentiment and opinion, as nonverbally communicated through actors’ bodily performance. Since GIFs are regularly used as reactions to posts on social media, the gestures they capture become means of communicating and commenting on all kinds of emotional registers, responses and opinions to virtually any post or item. GIFs therefore make it possible to both perform affect and to demonstrate cultural knowledge.⁴⁷

Yul Brynner GIFs can be understood as ripples of cinematic history that gesture towards the bodies of work from which they derive, while also extending well beyond their original contexts and narrative frames as summations of feeling, mood and register. What remains and thrives in such circulation and repurposing also indicates how the bodily performance styles pertaining to specific stars continue to be identified, remembered and potentially appreciated. Film star GIFs encapsulate their most recognizable, even iconic, gestures and moments. So there is Rameses, mocking, embracing Nefertiti and then turning away from her, revealing his muscular back and dramatically swinging his cape in protest. Here are gunslingers in black, on the prowl, falling down and shooting to kill, their robotic facial panels removed and smoking. And here the King of Siam communicates exaggerated astonishment, engages in a frenzied polka and, with one hand on his hip, snaps his fingers in a simple gesture of regal command.

Footnotes