Today, we continue our very questionable DEEP DIVE into Marlon Brando’s complete filmography. Given that there’s (potentially) like 26 or so hours of cinema left in front of us, we’re not going to waste time on a fancy preamble. We will, though, say that spending this much time with one actor has endeared us to him. Call it Stockholm Syndrome if you must, but at this point Marlon can stockholm our syndrome any day.
The Chase (1966)
The Chase is more a systems and ensemble feature than a star vehicle. A convict (Robert Redford) from a small town escapes from prison which, then, unsettles almost everything in that small town. Folks are alternately worried and excited that this prison escapee is (maybe) headed home. We spend time with the sheriff’s department and an oil barron and a sharecropper and bankers and a hotel owner and lawyers and migrant workers and a junkyard owner and dentists in town for a convention and assorted citizens and wayward teens and more or less every other member of this small society. The plot and individual characters are kind of beside the point. We’re really just being invited to see how a social world is stitched together and unraveled and torn apart.
While the film takes a macro-view of the community, that doesn’t mean that we aren’t treated to a micro-view of Brando doing Brando things. We see him polish no fewer than three things (a saddle, his shoes, and a pipe), so he’s still committed to odd little tasks. He’s not, though, in this film very much. His longest scene is one in which he doesn’t say a word. If there’s anything notable about his performance, it’s that it fits perfectly into the world of the film. He - like the other stars in the film (Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Robert Duvall) - just does his thing. He’s as interesting as anyone else.
There’s something very special about this movie - its cast, its thin but propulsive plot, its depiction of subtle chaos and anarchy underlying the calm and quiet of small town life, its interest in seemingly every possible person who enters the frame - and we couldn’t turn away. The way the film baits the viewer into thinking, initially, that this is just going to be some story about a fugitive on the run, then spends over half its runtime engaging directly with the racism, misogyny, favoritism/corruption, injustices of the justice system, vigilantism, and various other ills that afflict North American society is fantastic. The Chase truly deserves way more critical attention and praise that it seems to have received. [When critics and programmers eventually take notice of this movie and hail it as an ahead-of-its-time classic, remember that you found out about it here first.]
Such a great movie, loved it totally, and it genuinely almost derailed this whole post. We were tempted to devote thousands of words to this movie rather than the Brando-verse as a whole, but we have a promise to keep. Watched 135 of 135 minutes and will watch those 135 minutes again soon.
The Appaloosa (1966)
We really have a hard time with westerns. Truly. The music, the hats, the dialogue, the tundra, no thank you. It’s 1870 in an American border town. Marlon looks grizzled and over-exposed.
There might be worse fake beards and wigs, but we don’t want to see them. Or maybe that’s just how his hair goes? Regardless, Marlon, as is his style, washes his face in a horse trough within 3 seconds of being onscreen then enters a more or less empty church to take confession. He, he says, has “done a lot of killing and sinned with a lot of women” and this line coupled with the beard and the hair made us laugh and lose all possible hope of actually watching this movie.
As soon as the camera leaves Branbeard and turns its attention to the Mexican folks who live in this town we’re in racial caricature territory. John Saxon is in brownface and trying to damage the entire continent with the thickest and most awful “accent” you’ve ever heard. Nope. Watched 9 out of 99 minutes.
A Countess from Hong Kong (1967)
Asia hasn’t fared well in Brando movies thus far and, judging from the musical theme that opens this film, that trend looks set to continue. We’re in Hong Kong and, urm, apparently there’s like a club or something where men can buy tickets to dance with “countesses”? These countesses are all white ladies. This movie’s directed by Charlie Chaplin which should mean something - but we’re genuinely too distracted by this countess business to think about that.
Brando is a man named Ogden, “the son of the richest oil man in the world,” and looks as much like an Ogden as he can. Ogden apparently had the flu? There’s a weird number of references to this, but he’s apparently feeling well enough to go out for dinner and drinks with the countesses. The countesses, we’re told, are the daughters of Russian aristocrats who escaped to Shanghai during the revolution? We’re told all this in straight-up expository dialogue. It’s bad.
Brando flirts with Sophia Lauren (an countess) and wakes up the next morning to be told a) he’s now an ambassador of some kind for Saudi Arabia (?!), b) there are a lot of phone numbers written in lipstick all over his shirt (??!!), and c) Sophia Lauren is stowed away in his boat cabin closet (???!!!). The set-up for this whole thing is tedious and incomprehensible. Marlon does some slapstick-y shit. It’s nice to see him trying to do broad comedy, but it’s really just very awkward. The film might have its charms, but they’re not working on us. Watched 20 out of 120 minutes.
Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967)
They’re taking the “golden eye” thing a bit far. The movie is shot with like yellow film or something. It’s staggeringly ugly and distracting. The yellowness of this movie really can’t be overstated.
Marlon, though, is back to doing a TASK in his first frames. He admires himself briefly in the mirror after lifting weights. Anxieties about aging, we’re guessing, are going to win the day here. He’s doing an accent of some kind, but no earthly idea what it is. He might be going for “Southern,” but is closer to “effete bog goblin.” He’s really almost indecipherable. The plot and characters in this thing are, likewise, indecipherable. Elizabeth Taylor rides horses and might be functionally illiterate? There are soldiers going to soldier school? This movie is literally too yellow to keep watching. We’re here for experimental aesthetics and bold color timing, but we aren’t here for whatever this is meant to be.
Watched 14 out of 108 yellow minutes.
Candy (1968)
Deliberately problematic, borderline insane, ultra camp, and maybe almost interesting. We would’ve turned this off after 10 minutes, but there was something transfixing about how horny and unhinged this movie is. It’s a farce in which a young, naive girl named Candy misadventures her way around and encounters impossibly strange and awful men who want to sleep with her. We could call it a critique of hetero-patriarchy, but that’s a bit much. It’s mostly just madness.
Marlon doesn’t show up until 95 minutes into the film. And when he does? He’s doing, let’s call it, meta-brownface? He plays a conman pretending to be a new age guru. This doesn’t make it any less upsetting. It’s a fucked up performance in an already fucked up film. He’s on camera for all of fifteen minutes. Every part of this thing is bewildering and maybe bad, but also deranged in a mesmerizing way. We watched 124 out of 124 minutes and we’re not sure how we feel about that.
The Night of the Following Day (1969)
There’s an unsettling tension in this movie from the very start. We’re no longer doing the nice musical overture with the credits, but instead watching a woman sleep on plane while the engine roars dully in the background. A flight attendant wakes her for landing and a child is playing a haunting melody on the recorder. This is the stuff of nightmares.
The unnamed woman grabs her bags, clears customs, and meets our man Marlon. He’s blonde again and shot from below, from her perspective. His dialogue is obscured by the loud sound of planes.
We learn he’s (posing as) a chauffeur. Drives a Rolls Royce. Seems that the sleeping lady is the daughter of a rich person. Marlon and associates have decided to kidnap her. She’s taken and held in a secluded house on the beach, ransom is demanded, and (as you likely figure) nothing goes as planned. It’s all slow dread and increasing tension. We don’t want to spoil it, so we’ll just say that it feels almost like Antonioni or Haneke or Corbijn (?) decided to make a deliberately plotted film for popular audiences. Existential horror and sadism subtend even the most anodyne moments. It’s not perfect, but it is good and often great. Watched 93 of 93 minutes.
Burn! (1970)
Could only find Italian dubs of this movie for unknown reasons. Marlon somehow mixed up with slavery and colonialism in 19th century Antilles sounds like A FUN TIME, but we’re not about to spend money to see what happens here. There are limits to our dedication to this ridiculous endeavor. The director, Gillo Pontecorvo, also did The Battle of Algiers (1966) which is really great - so this is probably great too. Apologies to all you Burn!heads out there, but watched 5 out of 112 minutes in Italian (but we don’t really understand Italian so that prob doesn’t count).
The Nightcomers (1971)
This likely isn’t meant to be a comedy, but it is very funny. You probably don’t know this, but Marlon Brando looks silly when he runs. He doesn’t do it often. It’s not his style. Here, though, the film opens with him running away and hiding from Victorian children. It’s absurd. More absurd, though, is that he takes a moment mid-scurrying-away to catch a frog.
It seems that Marlon has caught the frog to amuse the British children who’ve been chasing him. When the children catch him, he makes the frog smoke a cigarillo. Y’know, for fun.
And the frog explodes! This movie is meant to be a prequel to James’ Turn of the Screw. That’s not even a joke. How frog cruelty factors in to ghostly governesses isn’t something we’ll ever find out. Yet another mystery of the universe, we guess. Watched 9 out of 96 minutes.
The Missouri Breaks (1976)
Another western. It’s maybe about horse thieves? This one is so badly written that it was agony to hang in there for the 36 minutes it takes Brando to show up. And when he does? Ridiculous.
Did not care to know why Marlon is like this. We just said a little prayer for the horses used in this film and took a screencap. Watched 36 out of 126 minutes.
The Formula (1980)
This is a straight-up bad movie about Nazi secrets, murder, and corporate espionage written by someone who has apparently hates viewers. It’s excruciatingly slow and the script is 90% extraneous dialogue. The pace is so slow that it feels like we are still watching this. Its languor has coated our mind. Every minute is an hour now, every hour a month. The only reason we were able to free ourselves from its oppressive, leaden spell is because Marlon Brando smells a rock in the first five seconds he shows up. Thanks, Marlon, for being shockingly weird always.
Watched 32 our of 117 minutes.
A Dry White Season (1989)
A devastating and mercilessly direct look at apartheid South Africa in 1976 (before and after the Soweto Uprising) told in miniature through two families - the Ngubenes and the Du Toits. It would be wrong to center Brando (who plays a sardonic human rights lawyer) in this write-up. His performance, brief as it is, is great and Fallstaffian - but every performance in this film is excellent (Zakes Mokae and Janet Suzman in particular). The script, direction, sound, and camera are all likewise sharp. This isn’t the right context to address any of this, but the movie raises some difficult questions about what exactly political cinema does (or can do) in the world. It deserves a much wider audience than it seems to have received. Watched 107 of 107 minutes.
[This seems as good a place as any to note how hoisted we are by our own petard with this exercise. It was meant to be fun and slight, but has turned into a bizarre feat of endurance and is truly testing the limits of our critical competency. It’s hard to keep talking mostly about Marlon when, now, we mostly want to talk about how doing something like this has put pressure on certain facets of criticism (like, say, distance or dispassion) in interesting ways that we can’t develop or discuss at all because we still have more Marlon movies to watch. We would really, at this point, like to stop watching these movies. The truly radical swings in tone and quality are challenging and might be outright damaging to us. To wit:]
The Freshman (1990)
As impossible as it was to watch this after A Dry White Season, it’s very good and way smarter than it has any right to be. It’s about a film student who gets involved with a mob boss who imports endangered animals for fine dining. Brando parodies his role in The Godfather. This would be obnoxious save that the film deliberately hangs a lampshade on it. Marlon’s character here, we’re told, was the inspiration for The Godfather. Matthew Broderick is likable af and Marlon is shockingly funny. We don’t want to spoil anything, but if watching Marlon Brando walk a Komodo dragon in a cornfield is something you want to see - this is the only likely place you’ll be able to see it. (That said, there’s still more movies so who fucking knows).
Watched 102 of 102 minutes.
[For real, we’re dying. This is too much. We need a justifiable reprieve from watching whole Marlon movies. Please, Brando, make a bad career move.]
Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992)
hahahaha skipped until we found Brando, so effectively 2 seconds out of 120 minutes.
[Thank you, Marlon, for your questionable choices and/or terrible agent. We are not worthy of your mercy, but are genuinely grateful for it.]
The Brave (1997)
This is directed by Johnny Depp. It also stars Johnny Depp. Oh, but also also it was co-written by Johnny Depp. This is a truly dangerous amount of Johnny Depp. We’re not sure we have a strong enough constitution.
There’s no dialogue in the first 10 minutes - just Johnny in a bandanna half-wearing a shirt - and when the dialogue starts one wishes it hadn’t. Johnny is very explicitly trying to channel Lynch (literally everything - from composition of frames to script to set dressing to music to performances - feels like imitation Lynch). We’re not going to go into it, but it’s very apparent and unexpected and impossible to understand. We’re not here, though, to talk to you about Johnny Depp. We’re here for Marlon. What’s he up to? Obviously, he lives in a basement and plays harmonica in a wheelchair adorned with microphones or cameras or something and waxes philosophical about death at length (for no clear reason)?
We just can’t with this right now. Watched 28 of 123 minutes - but weirdly intrigued (despite the fact that we should know better than to be intrigued) and might revisit when we’ve recovered all our faculties.
Free Money (1998)
Marlon is asleep under newspapers and woken by redheaded twins in the first minute of this thing.
The twins are pregnant? They have to get married? What in the holy hell are we watching.
This movie is bonkers. It’s a dark comedy about a corrupt and homicidal prison warden confounded by a bunch of idiots. Coen Bros. by way of Farrelly Bros. Mira Sorvino, Thomas Haden Church, Donald Sutherland, and Charlie Sheen are in this. Brando seems like he’s having a fantastic time in every scene. This is his second to last film and it’s kind of delightful to see him seem to enjoy himself.
We’re not going to lie, though. Our pleasure in his performance and this film might have something to do with the fact that this is the last of his films that we haven’t seen. Watched 94 of 94 minutes and not even upset about it.
This post is already wayyyyyy too long - but we’re definitely not splitting this into three parts. Damaging our brand is very on brand and all, but we already lost a healthy number of subscribers with the last post. It’s all fun and games until we’re watching 808 minutes and 2 seconds of Marlon Brando movies for no reason and nobody. So, let’s wrap this up quickly with a some lessons:
Don’t watch every movie Marlon Brando has made and definitely don’t do it in chronological order over the course of five days. It’s tempting, we know, to follow our noble example - but don’t.
Brando can’t carry a film by himself. He isn’t good on his own. There’s something, here, to be said about the falsity of icons - but we don’t have the energy or mental wherewithal to articulate it. Brando is really on a good version of Brando when he’s surrounded by good versions of everyone and everything else. He ascends or descends to the circumstances in which he finds himself.
It’s sad (?) that Brando was never directed by most of the great directors working while he was alive. There’s, no doubt, good reason this never happened. We know absolutely nothing about this man’s private life or what he was like to work with, so can’t really say. We just think that Brando in a Mike Nichols movie would’ve been a treat.
We really ought to think more thoroughly about the things we write about and the way in which we write about them, but self-love is hard won and we’re (evidently) still fighting that battle.
So, dear readers, that’s it. Marlon Brando will never be mentioned here again. We can finally and conclusively answer our dear reader’s question “Marlon Brando?” The answer? It’s been obvious the whole time: Marlon Brando!
If we think of something more profound to say after we’ve slept for a couple days (and hopefully only dreamed about Marlon a little), we’ll put it in the comments. This whole thing required a tremendous amount of time and energy for what, ultimately, is just a slight bit of content. We’ve tried hard to amuse and inform. To offer something no one asked for and, possibly, no one even wants. Fitting, maybe, that our questionable effort to questionable ends mirrors most of Marlon’s career (without, of course, all the success or fame or awards or money) and the careers of most entertainers. All that thought and effort and time, for this?
We now, at the end of this, kind of sympathize with someone who - after decades of trying to amuse or delight or move people with their work - might consider doing a Henry James adaptation with an exploding frog. This, oddly, makes complete sense and, maybe, might make more sense than absolutely anything else.
Another good blog. I would like to suggest that the next actor that you critique would be Eric Roberts. I think it would be a good use of your time to review all of his movies. He has appeared in a measly 455 films. I figure if you average ten minutes per movie and another 5 to find it then it would only take you about 115 hours to get that done. Should keep you busy for a while. Have fun.
Pt 2 didn't disappoint. I think I was a little surprised by the number of Brando movies you HAD seen. I knew when certain movies were coming via chronology and you didn't review them. This could have been even more diabolical than it was.
Great post. Can't wait to read more in the future.
Perhaps you could do a director instead of an actor in the future. Charlie Kaufman?