It’s unanimous – Marlon Brando was the best actor of his or any other generation. Just like Laurence Olivier or Sarah Bernhardt. Certainly he was the luckiest actor in the 20th century – fortunate enough to walk into Stella Adler’s acting class at the outset of his

career and pique the interest of Elia Kazan. Over the next four weekends his luck and talent will be celebrated at the American Museum of the Moving Image with curious cherry-picking of his four best known roles.

In his second film, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Brando and his director/creator Kazan transferred their Broadway production to the screen. Watching the young Brando’s Stanley Kowalski preen and mumble off of Vivien Leigh’s Blanche, over 50 years after the fact, his early appeal is clear – he was the masculine embodiment of the female rape fantasy. Two years later came “The Wild One,” in which the actor wore denim and leather, roared through small towns on a motorbike, and fought the rather more satisfying tough guy Lee Marvin. The appeal here is rather more dated and tepid.

His early career dispensed with, the series jumps a full 20 years forward to the remarkable one-two combination of 1972, both of them shown in new 35 mm prints. For Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris,” the director asked him “to bring the whole experience of his life to the role.” It was the Midwest exotica of the man as much as his famous immersion in technique that made him fascinating.

The final weekend has Brando’s nuanced hamminess in “The Godfather,” which won him an Oscar and inspired the rest of the cast to copy their understanding of his approach for the remainder of their careers.