The Actors Studio style produced more than Brando, Dean, Karl Malden, Eli Wallach, Rod Steiger and Lee J Cobb.
Mr. Meyer directs the movie, from a story by Karl Alexander and Steve Hayes, in a luxe '40s studio style.
Having spent much of my career in conflict zones overseas, my experience shooting studio style portraiture of children is, let's say, limited.
From Rossellini's example, the young French New Wave critics learned to fuse studio style with documentary methods, and to make high-relief drama on a low budget.
But it's worth recalling that the high studio style — its gloss, its earnestness, its goofiness, its charm, the entire, seemingly universal cinematic spectrum with which it illuminated the world — is also the work of exclusion.
"Despite Mr. Soderbergh's attempt to mimic the classic studio style, notably through the deliberate editing patterns and fairly restrained camerawork, 'The Good German' bears little resemblance to a Hollywood film of the period," wrote Manohla Dargis in The Times.
Daniele da Volterra and Pellegrino Tibaldi painted in an explicitly Michelangelesque manner, while Cavaliere d'Arpino (Giuseppe Cesari) and Federico Zuccari, at the end of the century, investigated the complex intellectual conceits of the Raphael studio style.
The Brando who became a model for the Actors Studio style, the Stanislavski Method or Elia Kazan's intensity (however you want to call it) already looks like a figure from history.
But the Actors' Studio style would prove enormously influential in its stress on inner truths to be mined by the actor - indeed, it was a method that made a cult of the brooding actor, turning him from professional interpreter to creative genius (for good and ill).
I'd gone expecting to hear an "Inside the Actor's Studio" style retrospective.
