Marlon Brando, Master Director, Once

“Marlon Brando is the best actor of my generation—when he is functioning,” Kirk Douglas told me in a fascinating but sadly too brief interview in 1980. At the time I didn’t follow up on his observation as I was anxious to get Douglas to talk about his own films; but I was surprised. Brando’s work in the 1970s had been uneven, which explained Douglas’s qualification, “when he is functioning”—we’d all seen too many performances when the actor was merely present.

Certainly Brando had been good in The Godfather and extraordinary in Last Tango in Paris; but he had been hopelessly self-indulgent in Apocalypse Now, and far too often the light voice had been unintelligible. Letting his character in The Godfather get wounded in the throat was plain crazy, nevertheless one has to admit it was a richly detailed characterisation. Thinking back, however, for all his “difficulty”, in the 1950s Brando was a giant. His Stanley in Streetcar Named Desire (1951) revolutionised screen acting, as did his even finer performance in On the Waterfront (1954).

Then there had been One-Eyed Jacks, his only film as director and arguably the most interesting of the lot. When the film was finally released in 1961 it was clear that he had done a splendid job of directing himself and just about everyone else in the cast. Brando had what directors call “the camera eye”. Each shot was beautifully composed and the film was one of the last visual treasures of the Vista Vision process. But somehow the film was lost. In the 1980s, when I might have considered using the film in my courses, there wasn’t even a 16mm print available. Later there were some tapes and DVDs; but their poor quality made them unwatchable.

Fortunately at long last Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, who like me had been overwhelmed by the film when it was first released, have recently supervised a restoration. Last year One-Eyed Jacks was shown to great acclaim at festivals all over the world and it has just been released by Criterion on DVD. As usual with Criterion the DVD is the visual equivalent of a scholarly edition of a work of literature. There are interviews with surviving participants, a tape of Brando commenting on the script, and a full account of the making of the film. Still needed, in my opinion, is an edition of the scripts written during pre-production. Reportedly they included work by Rod Serling, Sam Peckinpah, Calder Willingham and Guy Trosper. Originally the script was based on a novel, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones by Charles Neider, which was the Billy the Kid story with the setting transferred to Monterey. This appears to be one of the few things the film retained from the book, with many of the final sequences, including the impossibly romantic conclusion, set against the lush seascapes of the coastal locations.

Brando rejected the scripts by these writers, then claimed he was mounting an assault on a citadel of clichés—presumably the traditional western. Certainly he did come up with a highly original narrative and manoeuvred Stanley Kubrick out of the project so he could direct the film himself. But the best westerns of the 1950s and late 1940s are among the finest achievements of American film and there is every reason to believe Brando knew it. Reportedly he organised extensive screenings of numerous westerns during pre-production.

Just what films he watched and how they influenced him is not clear. Brando, however, could hardly fail to have been affected by the series of westerns made by Anthony Mann starring James Stewart, mainly based on scripts by Borden Chase. Back from the war, Stewart wanted to toughen up his image and from 1951 he played anything but the stalwart western hero. Although usually sympathetic, his characters were vulnerable, obsessed, but sometimes achieving after much anguish a kind of redemption. Stewart was not alone in playing ambivalent Western heroes. In John Ford’s classic The Searchers (1956), with John Wayne as Uncle Ethan searching for his niece taken by Comanches, the character is so racist that he seems just as likely to kill her as save her. At times the story could plausibly be resolved with Ethan being killed by his sidekick or even the girl herself. It doesn’t turn out that way; but as a schoolboy seeing the film for the first time I remember considering those possibilities.

By the mid-1950s film-goers who were not cultural snobs had come to expect this kind of complexity from their westerns. Ignored by mainstream critics at the time, some of the finest films of the genre took on the dimensions of Greek and Elizabethan tragedy. In Raoul Walsh’s Pursued (1947) Robert Mitchum’s protagonist is haunted by a series of catastrophes that seem to come from mysterious events in the past. It was not until the late 1960s that the Australian film critic John Flaus pointed out the allusions to the Furies in Greek tragedy. In addition Philip Yordan’s screenplay for Broken Lance evoked the King Lear story, and Spencer Tracy was magnificent as an old cattle baron who refuses to change with the times.

Another innovation of the 1940s and 1950s was the likeable villain. Bud Boetticher and Burt Kennedy virtually worked the device to death in their series of Randolph Scott westerns using actors like Lee Marvin, Pennell Roberts and Richard Boone. Anthony Mann and Borden Chase made the heroes’ adversaries even more complex. Sometimes they were former friends or a brother “who just ain’t no good”. In arguably the greatest of Mann–Stewart films, The Man from Laramie (1955), the villain, played splendidly by Arthur Kennedy, is himself the tragic figure. There are also touches of Lear in Donald Crisp’s cattle baron that can, perhaps, be attributed to Mann and screenwriter Philip Yordan.

So for all Brando’s claims about making a “new” type of western, the genre at its best was very rich in writing, performance and direction and also in the film-makers’ use of a varied range of locations. This is why the switch to Monterey with its seascapes was a godsend to Brando. He was teased in some of the news stories for waiting for the waves to run in a certain direction before taking a particular shot, but that was no different from John Ford or Howard Hawks watching the sky to capture a cloud formation that was appropriate for the sequence they were about to stage. In any case Brando’s shot is in the movie and works splendidly. The seascapes give the film a look that distinguishes it from any other comparable work of the period.

One-Eyed Jacks begins like a conventional revenge western. Rio (Brando) and Dad Longworth (Karl Malden) are bank robbers operating south of the border in Mexico. We find them rather casually robbing a bank then being chased by the Federales. Their horses exhausted, one agrees to stay behind while the other goes to buy fresh horses. Dad heads off to get the horses then decides to leave Rio to his fate. Five years later Rio escapes from jail and comes looking for his old companion. Dad is now “respectable”, the marshal of the town where Rio and some new sidekicks plan to rob the bank.

Brando used multiple takes, encouraging the actors to improvise, then included this new material in the script. The result was a producer’s nightmare; for the cast it was an actor’s dream, with the opportunity of exploring their characters as they had rarely been able to do before. With Malden—who was Brando’s co-star in Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront—Brando creates a complex ambiguous relationship, each lying to the other, and each wondering if he is being deceived. Brando keeps the takes long to explore every nuance of his own and Malden’s performances. Malden gives a superbly understated portrait of urbane hypocrisy—the one-eyed jack of the title.

Brando’s Rio begins as enjoyably irresponsible then segues into implacable menace beneath a deadly soft-spoken politeness. In a well structured scene his redemption is obliquely suggested rather than encapsulated, and all the better for it. Brando’s eccentric direction evokes multi-layered performances from a splendid supporting cast. Katy Jurado, famous for her role as the marshal’s former mistress in High Noon, is equally as good as Maria, Dad’s new wife, who doesn’t quite trust him. Again it is never explicitly stated; it is just embodied in the performance. Pina Pellicer as her daughter and Rio’s love interest brings to the part a heartbreaking sincerity and a touching melancholy. Brando is supposed to have worked very hard with her as actor and director, and it shows. Pellicer was to have a distinguished career in Mexican cinema before her suicide in 1964, a victim of depression. The melancholy we all found so affecting on the screen may have been only too real.

Brando seems to have worked closely with the supporting cast to evoke some extraordinarily detailed performances. Without changing his voice or appearance Slim Pickens (usually cast as comic relief) projects a believable sense of malice in his role as Longworth’s deputy. Ben Johnson, a former rodeo rider best known for his athletic heroes in John Ford films, projects a surprising duplicity as Rio’s new accomplice in the planned bank robbery, while veteran character actor Elisha Cook Jnr is effective in a small part as a resourceful bank teller.

Notoriously, Brando’s final cut of One-Eyed Jacks was five hours long. A film coming in over budget and over length is usually released in a butchered version that bears little relation to its creator’s vision. In this case someone at Paramount must have cared. Although there are signs of abridgement, the film is powerful and effective. Brando had intended to end One-Eyed Jacks tragically but was over-ruled and with some grace shot a charmingly romantic conclusion.

It is one of the misfortunes of film history that Brando’s lack of personal discipline prevented him directing again. But One-Eyed Jacks is one the great westerns and we can be grateful to Spielberg and Scorsese for this admirable restoration.