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And that little incident gave Stewart the opportunity to tell us why people love the movies: “What you’re doing is … you’re giving people little, tiny pieces of time that they never forget.”

We all have those pieces of time in our heads. And though we can keep everything preserved at home now on DVD and BluRay, it’s never really enough, is it? It’s nice to have something tangible – a book perhaps – to help us hold onto and appreciate those fleeting images on the screen.

There’s a new biography of Marlon Brando and a compendium of commentaries on a thousand films – with Brando as Don Vito Corleone on the cover – and both these fine books are feasts for film fans.

Somebody (Knopf, $26.95) is a splendid and highly readable biography by Stefan Kanfer. Thorough without the curse of being academic, Somebody (as in “I couldda been . . . “),gives us insight and anecdotes that will enrich your next trip through On the Waterfront, Last Tango in Paris or Apocalypse Now. Brando was a hugely talented actor whose style is still controversial, nearly 60 years after his film debut. We might start a fist-fight arguing if he was the best screen actor ever.

But he’s always been portrayed as enormously lazy, because he refused to memorize scripts. Kanfer gives a different interpretation. Because he wanted to be natural, to be really thinking instead of parroting dialogue, he placed cue cards all over the film set, so he would appear to be doing what he was, in fact, doing: searching for the words.

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Brando made classic films but he hit a bad patch in the 1960s. There was the vapid Bedtime Story, a comic misfire. The Appaloosa followed, a Western in which the star appeared to be asleep the whole running time. Then came the disastrous Countess from Hong Kong, which brought Brando together with Charles Chaplin. What should have been cinema history was instead a huge snorefest, prettied up by the presence of Sophia Loren.

He nearly had to beg to get the lead in The Godfather. Cheeks stuffed with Kleenex, he aged himself suitably for the producers' approval. Director Francis Ford Coppola never doubted he’d found the right man to play the head of the Mafia family. After that film and Last Tango, Brando worked only when the money or the cause moved him.

Brando was a puzzling man. Little “Bud” from Omaha grew up, went east and took over Broadway as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, then redefined the concept of screen acting in the 1950s. Along the way he accumulated three wives, several dysfunctional children, an island in the South Pacific and the burden of immense sadness. Perhaps the most telling and heartbreaking part of Kanfer’s book is the story of Brando the loving and tormented father.

It being a movie-star biography, there's a requisite amount of gossip. Even this is well handled, including the rumor that Brando had a fling with Laurence Olivier while Lady Olivier -- Vivien Leigh -- was playing Blanche DuBois to Brando's Kowalski. Brando and Olivier swimming naked in a pool while Viv gets a snootful of sherry ... now, that's an image we'll not soon forget.

Somebody brings back to life this greatest of actors who shrugged off his work as insignificant. Kanfer urges us to disagree with Brando’s self assessment.

It’s fitting that of the 1,000 films profiled in David Thomson’s

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