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The fall guy

There was an article in The Guardian yesterday (July 23, 2007) on Marlon Brando titled The Fall Guy, pointing out that the movie legend "died in every single film he made in the 1970s".

It says, in part:

Marlon Brando is generally agreed to be the most self-destructive male in motion picture history. A Broadway legend by the time he was 25, and still thought by many to be the biggest star, if not the greatest actor, in the history of the art form...

If Brando the man seemed haunted and cursed from the start, this is no less true of the characters he played on screen. No leading man ever perished more often, or got his face stomped on more frequently, than Marlon Brando. (Likewise, no dramatic actor ever took so many roles that required him to stay in a wheelchair or dress like his granny or pretend to be mentally ill.) Unlike Harrison Ford, who has never died on screen, unlike icons such as Cary Grant and Gregory Peck and Henry Fonda and John Wayne, who tried to keep the mortality down to a bare minimum, Brando died early and often on camera. Tom Cruise, the only combatant to survive The Last Samurai, has died only once in his three dozen films (in Collateral). By contrast, during the 1970s, Brando died in every single film he appeared in...

Well, we will deal not with why the star of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) didn't have a better endgame (fare better at the end of films). This piece deals instead with "fall guy" the term itself.