What had started as a sensitive social document became a stew of clichés. Hellman’s dialogue rarely rose above the level of comic strip (“Shoot a man for sleepin’ with someone’s wife? Half the town ’ud be wiped out”), and Penn never did get full control of the proceedings. This despite Marlon’s lack of onscreen vanity—the gut-over-the-belt sheriff needed no padding around the waistline—and the technical advice he whispered to the director. Penn had earned his respect by quietly and professionally going about his business, neither coddling nor prodding the star. On set Marlon insisted, as usual, that the actor’s “art” was nonexistent. But his diction and movement gave the lie to that attitude, and so did his suggestion that the beating could be filmed in an “undercranked” slow-motion style, then projected at a normal tempo. That scene became one of the movie’s most persuasive incidents. For a moment it seemed that the old, exciting Brando might be reasserting itself under Arthur Penn’s careful management.
And then, in the great Hollywood tradition, Spiegel brought in three writers to rework the scenario to his satisfaction. Their contributions served to make the disarray worse. Penn had intended to edit The Chase in New York, where he had other commitments. The producer wouldn’t hear of it; the raw footage was flown to London, where he could personally supervise the cutting. Hellman washed her hands of the whole business. In her view the script had been “mauled about and slicked up.” Slicked up, no doubt. But her contempt for the South, where she was raised, and her sour view of the U.S. justice system (“If you knew what I know about American prisons, you would be a Stalinist, too”) did their own mauling without any outside interference.
By the time Penn journeyed to London, Spiegel had pared The Chase down to his satisfaction. The director was mortified: Almost all of Brando’s most brilliant moments—the best material in the film—had been left on the cutting-room floor. “It was the performance Marlon had given,” Penn was to recall, “but stripped of all his improvisation. It was like, ‘You want the scene? Here it is, as written. This is the dialogue.’”
Absurdly plotted, loud, inert, the film opened to bewildered audiences. They dwindled by the day. The critical consensus was uniformly hostile. Time found The Chase a “shockworn message film top-heavy with subtle bigotry, expertly exploiting the violence, intolerance and mean provincialism that it is supposed to be preaching against.” Pauline Kael, The New Yorker’s assertive critic, thought the movie a portrait of “the mythical America of liberal sadomasochistic fantasies,” a “hellhole of wife-swapping, nigger-hating and nigger-lover-hating, where people are motivated by dirty sex or big money, and you can tell which as soon as they say their first lines.” Many people blamed Texas for the assassination, she pointed out, “as if the murder had boiled up out of the unconscious of the people there—and the film exploits and confirms this hysterical view.”
The long, complicated interplay of film critic and film actor had just begun.
5
In the March 1966 issue of The Atlantic, Kael cruelly appraised Marlon Brando in decline. She tagged him as one more superstar who had become a clown. The standard palaver had it that great comic artists like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton always wanted to play Hamlet. But over the past several decades, she wrote, the tide had reversed. Our Hamlets, like the gin-soaked John Barrymore and the ego-besotted Marlon Brando, had become “buffoons, shamelessly, pathetically mocking their public reputations.”
In his rebellious days, Marlon “was antisocial because he knew society was crap; he was a hero to youth because he was strong enough not to take the crap.” And now look: America’s most forceful and promising screen actor had turned into a self-deriding caricature.
A century before, Ralph Waldo Emerson had charted the American artist’s downhill process. “Thou must pass for a fool and churl for a long season.” According to The New Yorker’s cinema critic, “We used to think that the season meant only youth,” a time before actors could be expected to prove their talents. “Now it is clear that for screen artists, and perhaps not only for screen artists, youth is, relatively speaking, the short season; the long one is the degradation after success.” In a few years Kael would offer a hysterical overcompensation for this judgment. But she was not wrong in 1966. Marlon did find himself in serious decline, and not all of it was of his doing. By the mid-1960s, Hollywood’s vitality made itself known on the little screen, not the big one. On television the very worst of show business was on display every single day.
Five years before, Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, had shocked the National Association of Broadcasters by condemning American television. Once there had been broadcasts, in prime time, of Arturo Toscanini leading the NBC Symphony. There had been CBS’s high-minded program Omnibus, the home of James Agee’s documentary about Abraham Lincoln, Leonard Bernstein’s lively programs introducing the young to classical music, and William Faulkner’s guided tour of Oxford, Mississippi. Now viewers were subject to “a procession of game shows, violence, audience-participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western badmen, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons. And, endlessly, commercials—many screaming, cajoling and offending”—the intolerable driving out the worthy. Minow’s summary of daily and nightly TV: “a vast wasteland,” the term ominously echoing T. S. Eliot’s image of modern society—“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats.”
That wasteland was to become more arid in the next five years. By that time, Marlon sensed that no amount of mannerly compromising, no act of conciliation, no truckling to the powerful, would get him better scripts or a galvanizing director. TV was in the saddle and rode Hollywood. He and the film business were both in crisis, and neither knew what to do about it.
Marlon, as he always did when troubled, retreated into himself, growing more remote from his children and more critical of his friends. Women still found him attractive, but not many were willing to pay the price of a lengthy relationship—the emotional cost was prohibitive and the demands outrageous. At one dinner party he suddenly interrupted the proceedings by daring everyone to strip to the skin. Some did, some refused. One woman burst into tears. Marlon removed all his garments, plucked a lily from a nearby vase, stuck it in his rectum, and exited. The evening was considered more annoying than offensive; Marlon’s social high-wire act had grown tiresome. The only bright spot in his life seemed to be the negotiations for Tetiaroa: Every day brought the two sides closer to an agreement. But everything else could be summarized in an exchange with the Canadian director Sidney Furie, assigned to Marlon’s next feature, a Western entitled The Appaloosa:
FURIE: I’m really looking forward to this picture. I consider it a real privilege to be working with you….
BRANDO: Bullshit.
Why did he go on the offensive? Marlon couldn’t say. He only sensed that something was askew about this feature. It wasn’t the externals—he felt easier in the saddle these days, and the film schedule was undemanding. It was the style of the film that seemed wrong, and he had no idea how to fix it. His gaze was turned inward at a time when it should have been looking overseas.
In the 1960s Italian studios shot dramas in the Spanish desert region of Almería, an area reminiscent of the American Southwest. Marked by a crude vitality, they featured snarling, slit-eyed villains and taciturn heroes, minimalist photography, and the stark background music of human whistles and stallions’ hoofbeats. Hollywood producers mocked Sergio Leone’s unsubtle direction—until the “spaghetti Westerns” caught on with fans. Made for a pittance, the movies demythologized a genre and hauled in millions throughout Europe and the United States. In the process they jolted the careers of Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef, and other American actors. During this period Marcello Mastroianni, whose career ran parallel to Marlon’s, starred in several flops—The Poppy Is Also a Flower, made for American television, for example; and
Spara Forte, Più Forte, Non Capisco (Shoot Loud, Louder…I Don’t Understand), costarring Raquel Welch; and Diamonds for Breakfast, a misguided British production. Yet he also worked for Visconti in his adaptation of the Camus novel The Stranger, and made more movies paired with his vibrant costar Sophia Loren. Marcello loved to work and never put down his director, nor did he shy from roles of hapless men, antiheroes, and failed lovers. He continued to learn and grow while Marlon marked time in his native country, waiting for a miracle to occur. The Appaloosa would not fill the bill.
In contrast to the Italian product, Furie’s Western was marred by fussy, elaborate camerawork and ostentatious direction. The director’s previous pictures The Leather Boys and The Ipcress File reflected the syncopations of the 1960s; swinging London had earned him a reputation for a glossy with-it style. He was the wrong man to direct a Mexican border drama about an unwashed saddle tramp, Matt Fletcher (Brando), and a surly bandito, Chuy Medina (John Saxon), as they fight over a woman (Anjanette Comer) and the steed of the title. Unsurprisingly, Marlon attempted to undermine Furie at every turn. Furie responded with a withering appraisal. The key to Brando, he told studio personnel, is that he “loves chaos. You simply can’t get past ‘B’ in a conversation with him and you can’t get him to discuss a script rationally. He’s disorganized, no discipline at all.” What griped Furie most of all was Marlon’s social conscience.
The actor would sit still for hackneyed dialogue. At the same time he refused to act in any scene that, in his view, denigrated Native Americans. On Marlon’s orders, twenty-five pages of Indian fights were blue-penciled, every one of them crucial to the action. What remained were a series of stand-alone confrontations with Medina. These included a hand-wrestling scene complete with scorpion waiting to bite the loser, and the now-unavoidable moment of sadomasochism, this one featuring the hero roped and dragged over rough ground and through a stream before rising to exact his bloody revenge.
Earlier Kael had decried the “open season on Brando.” Now she was an integral part of it. Her review of The Appaloosa found him “trapped inside of still another dog of a movie…. Not for the first time, Mr. Brando gives us a heavy-lidded, adenoidally openmouthed caricature of the inarticulate, stalwart loner.” Her fellow reviewers piled on; Marlon was variously “somnambulistic,” “pretentious,” and “vaporous.” The Washington Post sent up a distress signal: “Brando’s self-indulgence over a dozen years is costing him and his public his talents.” Marlon acknowledged as much, adding another three years to the count: “The last fifteen years of my life seem never to have happened; they’ve just gone up the chimney without any impression or impact on me at all.”
Two men thought they knew what had happened to Marlon, and how to rescue him. In Cosmopolitan, film critic Hollis Alpert beseeched the star to return to Broadway for renewal. William Redfield went Alpert one better. The actor had been cast as Guildenstern in the celebrated 1964 production of Hamlet at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, with Richard Burton in the title role. He had also appeared in seven movies, one with Marlon. But for all that, Redfield worshipped the legitimate stage, dismissing film as trivial and destructive to the soul. In the book Letters from an Actor, published in 1967, he wrote ruefully of his colleague, remembering what had been and was no more:
“We who saw him in his first, shocking days believe in him not only as an actor, but also as an artistic, spiritual, and specifically American leader.” Technically, Laurence Olivier “drew rings around him, but Brando’s heartbeat was stronger. As Richard Burton has said of Brando, ‘He surprises me. He’s the only one who does.’ That he should say it of his film work leaves me dismayed, but on stage it was certainly true.” Jacob Adler, Stella’s father, used to dismiss a certain kind of Yiddish-theater ham: “He used to be an actor, but now he’s only a star.” By Redfield’s reckoning, that was exactly what had happened to America’s most promising leading man. Brando, he predicted, would not reclaim his stature until he went back on the boards.
That event was about as likely as Marlon’s taking up ballroom dancing. He was never much for looking in the rearview mirror. “If I’ve sold out, so be it,” he sighed to a friend. “In for a penny, in for a million.” That sum was a bit off; nonetheless his next assignment paid decently, and put him under the baton of the most famous name in cinema. At the age of seventy-seven the director was well past his prime and known to be imperious and crotchety. Marlon signed without misgivings; who could refuse Charlie Chaplin?
Charlie had written A Countess from Hong Kong in 1938 for his then-wife, Paulette Goddard. It was never made. The scenario had not aged well, nor had its personae. Still, A Countess from Hong Kong had a lot going for it besides Brando and Chaplin. Sophia Loren was the costar, abetted by Tippi Hedren, breaking away from the kind of glacial blonde roles Alfred Hitchcock had given her in The Birds and Marnie; and by Margaret Rutherford, one of Britain’s greatest comic actresses. It was up to them to enliven an elemental plot.
Since the Revolution, a beautiful White Russian princess has been supporting herself in Hong Kong as a taxi dancer (i.e., prostitute). Frantic to begin a new life, she sneaks aboard an ocean liner and into the stateroom of a married American senator, hoping to enlist him in her cause. The senator righteously objects to the stowaway’s presence, and then, by degrees, succumbs to her wiles.
The world had revolved many times since the late 1930s; Depression, World War, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the Korean conflict, the War on Poverty, the civil rights movement—all had passed or were passing in review, and everyone had been changed by the cascade of events. Everyone except Charlie. He still clung to the idea of a comedy of manners, with static camera work and big stars making grand entrances. No one dared to tell him that a generation later his gossamer had turned to cobwebs. Hedren watched her part, as the ambassador’s wife, shrink to microscopic proportions. She honored her contract nonetheless. Marlon knew that the plight of White Russians had become as obsolete as two-reelers. But he, too, put his concerns aside, convinced that Chaplin was the greatest genius in the history of motion pictures.
In the beginning he was amused to work alongside Sophia Loren, who had risen from Neapolitan sex goddess to Academy Award–winning actress in the stark wartime drama Two Women. A few weeks into the London-based production Marlon realized that he had made a disastrous misstep. The industry publications were full of stories about new talents and fresh approaches. Not a word about Charlie’s latest activity. To the editors, Chaplin was old news, and his actors archaic by association. As the director/scenarist/composer imposed his will on an uncomfortable cast, Mike Nichols was busy directing The Graduate, Arthur Penn Bonnie and Clyde, Luis Buñuel Belle de Jour, and Jean-Luc Godard Weekend, features that would attract young audiences and shake the foundations of Hollywood, just as Brando’s early films had in their day. The action had gone elsewhere, leaving Charlie and his cast in the dust.
Suddenly aware of what had happened, Marlon became irritable and unruly. In a close-up he asked Loren in a whisper if she knew there were black hairs growing out of her nose. She never forgave him for that, or for pawing her. Their lack of chemistry was apparent in every exchange. Charlie was to recall, “I had to keep reminding them it was a love story. The antipathy between the two stars was evident on the screen when each clasped the other as if embracing a werewolf.” Chaplin had always preferred small movements and sharp exchanges of dialogue; Marlon’s trademark gestures and hesitations drove him wild. Urged on by Loren, he confronted the star before a group of technicians and actors. “If you think you’re slumming, take the next plane back to Hollywood. We don’t need you.” Marlon responded tersely: “Mr. Chaplin, I’ll be in my dressing room for twenty minutes. If you give me an apology within that time, I will consider not getting on a plane and returning to the United States. But I’ll be there only twenty minutes.”
Chaplin knocked on Marlon’s door a few moments later, expressing the requisite remorse. Reconciliation followed, and there were n
o further incidents. Nor were there any high moments. Chaplin, convinced that order had been restored, continued to direct with close-minded authority, giving the cast line readings and showing the exact body movements he wanted. Nothing had changed since the palmy days of the 1920s, when an actor inquired: “How shall I play this, sir?” and Charlie replied, “Behind me and to the left.” Miserable with each other, disappointed in their director, Loren and Brando mugged and posed. The remainder of the cast, including Chaplin’s son Sydney, simply carried out orders and hoped for a miracle. It never came. The picture was dead on arrival and treated that way by the press. This was Chaplin’s last film, and one that did him no credit. Indeed, scenarist/historian William Goldman made the movie into a curse. Berating followers of the auteur theory in Adventures in the Screen Trade, he fumed, “I wish them all a very long life on a desert island with nothing but [A] Countess from Hong Kong for company.”
6
As the 1960s barreled on, journalists assigned more space to Marlon’s image than to his acting. The Beatles used his biker image on the cover of their new album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Newspapers ran photographs of the overweight star with numerous dates, ranging in age from the late teens to the early forties, and the tabloid News of the World headed an awed article, BRANDO: AS A LOVER HE SEEMS TO BE WITHOUT EQUAL IN CONTEMPORARY FILM HISTORY. Some of the women, stories noted, had remained friends; others wanted nothing to do with him. To Marlon, none were of significance. Then again, neither were the films he had made in this decade. Long before, the Adlers had taught him the Yiddish word for trash: shund. That was the label he gave to his 1960s efforts. Every so often there was noise about giving it all up and retreating to the South Seas. No one believed it this time—including Marlon. Well aware that he had been marked as a dilettante for his on-again off-again interest in social justice, and troubled by the abysmal state of his career, he abruptly took off for India with an eight-millimeter camera in hand. An almost medieval famine had struck the northeastern state of Bihar. Thousands of untouchables were dying, and Marlon intended to make a documentary that would move the hearts of the Western world. “The Bihari children I filmed,” he wrote, “were emaciated and covered with lesions and scabs. In many villages cows had chewed the thatch off the roofs because they had nothing to eat, and people were so thin it seemed incredible that they could walk. If you touched the cheek of a child, a hollow spot remained in her flesh after you removed your hand; the skin had no resiliency and was like that of a cadaver.” On his last day of filming, a little girl died as he watched helplessly. Marlon broke down and cried. He rushed home, rushed to get the film developed and edited, then took it to UNICEF personnel in Los Angeles. According to historians William Russo and Jan Merlin, the UN people viewed Marlon’s work “and grumbled that the star’s film resembled disconnected tourist views and couldn’t be integrated into any documentary because his film stock and compositions were so amateurish.”
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