Marlon Brando deserves a better biography than Richard Schickel has written. "Brando: A Life in Our Times" approaches vandalism in the dogged way that it strips everything dark, dangerous and titanic from its subject. What we have here is Marlon Brando reborn as Richard Schickel -- polite, bookish and perpetually worried. One of the grandest and most disorderly personalities of our era has been reduced to a pedestrian narrative of terminal blandness...

Mr. Schickel's treatment of Mr. Brando's public politicizing is indulgent, admiring and one-dimensional. He never draws connections between Mr. Brando's grandstanding and his notorious problems with directors, his psychological turmoil with male authority -- a social theme at the heart of our century. Similarly, Mr. Schickel is frustratingly inert in approaching such issues as Mr. Brando's gluttony, his romances and his Gauguin-like migration to the South Seas.