“Last Tango In Paris” (1972)
A few months after “The Godfather” smashed box office records, Brando cemented his comeback with another critically adored hit: Bernardo Bertolucci’s incredibly controversial “Last Tango In Paris.” After he felt increasingly disengaged during the 1960s, this and Don Corleone saw him reappear with a new fire in his (slightly more substantial) belly, here as Paul, a grieving American in Paris who begins a provocative affair with a much-younger French woman, Jeanne (Maria Schneider). Originally intended for Jean-Louis Trintignant, the character is an open wound of a man, giving in to his deepest and darkest sexual desires, and it feels somehow that this is a Brando stripped by Bertolucci of his fallbacks. With few tics or cotton-bud makeup tricks up his sleeve, it’s an almost unbearably raw performance, at once sympathetic, pathetic, pitiable and loathsome. Not every actor could pull off the philosophical gymnastics of Bertolucci’s dialogue (“Right up into the ass of death, right up in his ass, until you find the womb of fear”), but Brando pulls it off effortlessly, and his odd chemistry with Schneider is palpable, even if their real-life relationship was decidedly rockier. And though it didn’t prove to be, as Pauline Kael had predicted, “the most liberating movie ever made,” it undoubtedly retains its power to shock and provoke for a modern-day audience (and proved a big hit at the time). It’s a shame that our modern films about sex and sexuality are closer to “Fifty Shades Of Grey” than to this, but then if Brando had played Christian Grey, we might think very differently about that film…
“Apocalypse Now” (1979)
We hear a lot about Brando’s Colonel Walter Kurtz before we actually see him in Francis Ford Coppola’s landmark “Apocalypse Now”. He is discussed in hushed, fearful tones throughout the film as a kind of mythic figure — someone to be feared as much, if not more so, as the Vietcong. So it’s kind of amazing that when we finally see Kurtz sometime near the film’s hellish denouement — hiding in what appears to be monastic seclusion, sheathed in dark shadows and speaking with a tremble in his voice that suggests pain beyond anything you or I could comprehend — that he’s somehow even more terrifying than we expected. As a decorated U.S. Special Forces officer who finds himself lost to insanity brought on by the horrors of war — not to mention the whims of the local populace, who fancy him some sort of God — Brando exudes an intoxicating mixture of epic grandeur and real, human pain (who can forget his snarling to Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard that the young man is little more than an “errand boy sent by grocery clerks”?) Film lore goes that, in addition to his already-infamous bouts of erratic behavior, Brando also showed up to the shoot of “Apocalypse” drastically overweight, thus forcing Coppola to shoot his scenes with his star just so in hopes of concealing the actor’s ungainly physique. But whatever unspeakable madness Brando did during the making of this film — arguably Coppola’s best — is right up there on the screen for us to marvel at. In a career of big turns, this is one of the biggest, and definitely one of the scariest.
“The Freshman” (1990)
With “The Godfather” back in the zeitgeist thanks to the original trilogy being closed off in the same year, Brando parodied/paid tribute to probably his best known performance with this terminally undervalued comedy from “The In-Laws” and “Fletch” writer/director Andrew Bergman. “The Freshman” top-lines Matthew Broderick as a young NYU student who ends up taking work for a local mobster, Carmine Sabatini (Brando), who has a lucrative side business in serving up endangered species at a supper club, and who is being pursued by the Department of Justice. It’s an enjoyably odd film, and made odder by the presence of Brando, essentially reprising Don Corleone, and not looking much older here than he did there (in a fun meta touch, characters keep commenting on how much he looks like Corleone in the movie, a character supposedly based on Brando’s character here). It shouldn’t work, not even remotely, and yet it does. In part it’s because of Bergman, who’s never really got the credit he deserves for the kind of whip-smart mainstream comedies he makes, but in large part, it’s because of Brando. It would have been so easy for him to phone this in, but perhaps spurred on by the rest of the cast (Broderick’s perfectly cast, Bruno Kirby, Penelope Anne Miller and Maximillian Schell are all fun), he deftly replicates the earlier performance, but builds on it, too. He’s never playing for laughs, but there’s a spry wit to his timing here (impressive given that Brando usually came unstuck with comedy), and he’s remarkably funny, and even endearing as a result.
“The Score” (2001)
“The Score” could have been terrible and it still would have been notable for being the only time Brando and his disciple Robert DeNiro ever appeared in a film together. DeNiro, bringing shades of his hard, calculating Neil McCauley from Michael Mann’s “Heat”, plays another career thief and Brando plays his tough-shit old boss. That alone should be reason enough to see it; the sight of these two cinematic greats simply sharing the screen together makes the film worthy of at least one viewing. “The Score” definitely isn’t terrible, but it also isn’t great: it’s a solid, often groaningly predictable crime thriller directed with restraint and patience by Frank Oz (the voice of Yoda who would go on to direct “What About Bob?”, the underrated “Bowfinger” and also, um “The Stepford Wives”). Brando isn’t in the movie much, but he doesn’t need to be: his legend casts a shadow that more than makes up for his loss of screen time. His Max is a large, effusive, often profane man who speaks in that characteristic Brando whisper and whose craggy, weathered face and bulky frame seem to suggest a great personal history. Brando allegedly had difficulties with director Oz during the shoot — although the helmer has said, in later years, that he felt that he was perhaps being tougher on the iconic older actor than he needed to be — but it doesn’t show in the performance. As always, Mr. Mumbles was all-in here, and the results are riveting to watch.
Honorable Mentions: Has any great actor — arguably the greatest — made as few great movies as Brando did? Often when we write a piece like this, we find ourselves heartbroken at leaving certain films out, but that wasn’t necessarily the case here: outside of top-tier Brando, the pickings get slimmer, in part because of the relative infrequency of his performances, and his periods of questionable choices.
That said, there are still a few Brando turns that are worth checking out, even if they don’t quite sit among the Corleones and Kurtzs of the world. Among them was his reteam with Kazan on the John Steinbeck-penned biopic “Viva Zapata!,” which doesn’t quite live up to the talent assembled, but was still enough to win Brando Best Actor at Cannes. There’s also his beguiling, mildly miscast turn in “Guys And Dolls” and the now somewhat offensive, nevertheless watchable “Teahouse Of The August Moon.”
Plus, there’s powerful war drama “The Young Lions” (perhaps the film that came closest to making this list), Sidney Lumet’s mildly dull “The Fugitive Kind,” Brando’s lone directorial effort “One-Eyed Jacks,” the bloated “Mutiny On The Bounty,” diplomacy drama “The Ugly American,” John Huston’s “Reflections In A Golden Eye” (a rare highlight of the 1960s period), 1969’s “Burn!” (one of Brando’s personal favorites), Michael Winner’s “The Nightcomers,” Arthur Penn’s Western “The Missouri Breaks,” South African apartheid drama “A Dry White Season” (his first acting appearance in nine years), and his semi-decent team-up with Johnny Depp on “Don Juan DeMarco.” Anything else you think we’ve missed? Let us know in the comments.
– Jessica Kiang, Oliver Lyttelton, Nicholas Laskin
