The story resumes five years later with the escape of Rio and a Mexican prison mate, Modesto. Now bent on vengeance, Rio vows to find Dad and make him pay. Returning to Sonora, he learns from a pair of outlaws about a bank in Monterey, where the town’s sheriff is Dad Longworth. Rio and Modesto team up with Bob Amory (Ben Johnson) and Harvey Johnson (Sam Gilman), and head to Monterey. Visiting Dad, Rio convinces him that he was never captured and bears no grudge; he stays for dinner, meeting Dad’s Mexican wife, Maria, and stepdaughter, Louisa, and launching a flirtation with Louisa that results in a tryst on the beach and her pregnancy. When Rio shoots a man in self-defense, Dad uses the incident as an excuse for whipping Rio brutally in public and then smashing his gun hand with a rifle butt. Injured in body and soul, Rio rides off to a Chinese Fishing Village with his partners to recuperate. There he broods and is visited by Louisa, to whom he tells the story of Dad’s betrayal and his five years in prison. She professes her love but leaves without divulging her pregnancy because he is committed to killing Dad. In the final scenes, Amory and Johnson rob the bank without Rio, shooting Modesto beforehand, and then a child and a teller. Dad blames Rio, who was not there, and jails him, hoping to finish him off. The jail scenes of Rio’s dialogues with Dad, fights with Lon, the hostile deputy, and eventual escape, are the only scenes in the film that draw (thinly) on Neider’s novel. In a final duel, Rio kills Dad and rides away, promising Louisa to return in the spring when their baby comes. In Brando’s original tragic ending, Rio, Dad, and Louisa die, but Paramount producers, mindful of their financial stake, overruled his desire for a somber close to match the film as a whole.
Brando deferred on this but had his way on almost everything else. “It was fitting that Marlon end up directing because this picture was his vision,” Karl Malden, who played Dad Longworth, recalled. “He brought the bat and ball so we were all ready to play the game according to his rules.”14 Brando kept multiple annotated copies of the script, handwritten notes on story and dialogue during the development and shooting stages, and instructions for cuts during the editing stage. These scripts and notes reveal his responsibility for most of the conceptualizations, dialogue, and scenes. Many of the film’s best details were improvised under his direction during shooting—for instance, Rio eating bananas during the bank robbery, Dad’s shoeless escape, Rio fixing Dad’s “guess” by hiding bullets in both hands, Rio and Dad’s dramatic handshake during their tense reunion, Louisa hiding bullets in her hand to assist Rio’s jail escape.
These subtle revisions of plot and characterization created structural parallels and echoes, in keeping with the ongoing substitution of concise and humorous understatement for stiff, long-winded prose. One-Eyed Jacks bristles with memorable dialogue Brando introduced in late script revisions or ad-libbed during production. (Italics indicate words stressed by Brando and Malden.) In the early Lon–Rio encounter, Lon blows tobacco on Rio’s clothes and then says, “I got a lot of funny things to do today but lippin’ with you ain’t one of ’em.” In the Dad–Rio reunion, Rio to Dad: “You’re gettin’ way ahead of yourself, Dad. . . . Nothin’ happened to me. I just fooled around with them dogfaces till it got dark, and then I went down and stole a Captain’s horse.” Dad: “You sure that’s the straight of it Kid?” Kid: “Well you know me Dad. If I didn’t feel right about it, we’d been out there splatterin’ each other all over that front yard. . . . A man can’t stay angry for five years. Can he?” Rio, with Louisa the morning after: “Well that’s about it. It ain’t gonna help much to say it, but I shamed you. And I wish to God I hadn’t.” Their next meeting at the Chinese Fishing Village features the film’s best lines. Excising pages of dialogue, he inserts: “Reasons? I got reasons. I got seventeen hundred and eight of ’em. That’s how many days I spent down in that lead mine in the pen in Sonora. That’s how many nights I spent digging the maggots out of the sores on my ankles, with the rats running all over me.” Louisa asks, “And you think that to kill him will make you a man?” “Well I don’t know about that,” Rio responds, “but I know that I thought about him every day for five years. And that was the only thing that kept me going.” In the argument with Bob Amory, Brando revises “you pig sucker” to the notorious, “Get up/you/scum-suckin’/pig!” And he invents the jail dialogue. Rio: “You dyin to get me hung, aint ya!” Dad: “No Kid. You’ve been tryin’ to get yourself hung for the past ten years, and this time I think you’re gonna make it!” “You should’a quit when you were ahead.” Rio: “Like you huh?” Dad: “Uh hum, like me.” Rio: “You’re a one-eyed Jack around here Dad. I seen the other side of your face. . . . I am gonna get a trial, ain’t I Dad?” Dad: “Oh sure kid, sure. You’ll get a fair trial. And then I’m gonna hang you. Personally!”
Scriptwriting on One-Eyed Jacks, 1959. Photograph by Sam Shaw, © Sam Shaw Inc., Licensed by Shaw Family Archives, www.shawfamilyarchives.com.
One-Eyed Jacks reflects Brando’s ear for colloquial expressions and aptitude for coining memorable epithets. His insistence that language be used with precision and economy is consistent with a respect evident in the many thesauruses, collections of proverbs, and quotation books he owned (and often annotated). He kept lists of words and phrases, and the invention of odd terms and forms was a pastime he always enjoyed with his close friend Wally Cox.15 At the same time, the film affirms his recognition that most communication is nonverbal, exemplified by his refusal to caption the sorrowful scenes where Louisa divulges her loss of virginity and then pregnancy to her mother in Spanish. Brando was convinced that the actors would give stronger performances in their own language, and that audiences would grasp the essential content. Conveyed by tone and expression to English-speakers, the daughter’s repetition of the maternal fate—childbirth out of wedlock—is more intimate. Producer Frank Rosenberg complained about the scene but later admitted that Brando was right.16 Another trademark of Brando as director was his “enormous patience” in developing the contributions of cast and crew, and his protectiveness toward doubles and extras who are frequently imperiled on film sets.17
Brando’s talents as a director are particularly evident in a pair of dramatic entrances into saloons and in the dinner at Dad Longworth’s when Rio returns. The first saloon scene depicts a group of Mexican police enclosed in a darkened halo; a horizontal display of force, guns drawn, they cut like a razor blade across the saloon melee before them. In the next one, five years later, at the same saloon, Rio enters dressed in black with a red cape, signaling his sacrificial status, or perhaps simply that he is out for blood. Though he is accompanied only by Modesto, their entrance is equally portentous and menacing. At dinner with the Longworths, where a similar blend of ritual and danger prevails, Brando provides a lesson on how to use objects to convey meaning. Turning his fork and knife so they catch the light, he conveys the character’s hunger and threatening potential, as well as his penchant for transformation. Orchestrated together with the smile, the charm, the occasional utterance, Brando demonstrates one of his central acting principles: It is what the actor communicates beyond language that counts most.
Brando’s eye for detail and his fascination with history and authentic period speech and customs were everywhere apparent. Rio and Dad shake hands no fewer than three times during their reunion, which calls attention to the gesture’s traditional import—a signal between potential enemies that their hands are free of weapons. The Mexican-style hat worn by Rio throughout the film, slightly flattened with leather chinstrap—contrasting with the classic Stetsons worn by Dad, his deputies, Bob Amory, and other Anglo-Americans—confirms the protagonist’s cultural marginality. The Mona Lisa reproduction looming above Rio at the saloon just before Dad disables him at the whipping post features La Gioconda holding a card, an ace of hearts, touching the sleeve of her gown. Rio glowers but misses the warning, walking straight into Dad’s trap, having worn his heart on his sleeve in a bid for paternal approval once too often.
Handshake in One-Eyed Jacks. AF Archive/Alamy.
Despite the problems associated with One-Eyed Jacks, the story of directors lost and found (including Stanley Kubrick), incomplete scripts, ballooning budgets, and foiled shooting schedules, Brando managed to produce a movie that made money, won critical approval, and had a lasting influence on the Western genre. The film’s quality has been obscured in part because of the expectations the project aroused, a consequence of Brando’s success and celebrity. Gossip columnists upped the ante. “I saw the movie and have been thinking about it ever since,” wrote Sheilah Graham. “It will be Paramount’s biggest money maker for 1961.”18 It was natural for Brando films to earn huge sums and win awards, and when they earned less or won few, a competitive Hollywood was eager to declare an overrated star in decline. This was especially true of Brando, whose repudiation of the star system had always disturbed Hollywood.
Mona Lisa with card from One-Eyed Jacks. Paramount/Getty Images.
Retrospect can be clarifying. Contemporary reviews were almost uniformly positive. Reviewers acknowledged the film’s epic sweep, noting parallels to classics from Jacobean revenge tragedies to Wagnerian operas. Hollywood Variety reported: “It is [Brando’s] skillful direction and the fine photographic effects that he has achieved that make One-Eyed Jacks memorable.” In the New York Times, Bosley Crowther dubbed it “an extraordinary sort of western,” its directing “hard and realistic” as well as “romantic and lush,” recalling John Huston and Raoul Walsh. The New York Daily News gave it four stars and called it “stunning,” and even a rarefied New Yorker reviewer, Edith Oliver, conceded in her conclusion that “everyone connected with the picture is good, and if I have made it sound thoroughly unpleasant, then I have misled you. Many of the shocks it administers are refreshing and funny.” The Hollywood Reporter suggested: “it might be the best western ever made, and surely a classic that will stand with most of the all time great motion pictures; for it has taken the bones of cliché drama and superbly enhanced them with daring innovation. . . . Brando must, indeed, be honored as the father of this achievement.”19
One-Eyed Jacks did well commercially, attracting steady audiences worldwide and putting its profits into the millions by the end of the decade.20 Equally important was its impact on subsequent filmmakers, from Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood to Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, who included it on his list of top twenty films. We may never know Brando’s full intentions, since he stopped editing after producing a director’s cut, whose length has been estimated at three, four-and-a-half, and six hours, respectively.21 It is likely that the Paramount editors who took over did their best to honor Brando’s conception in their two-hour and twenty-one-minute version.
Centering on a charismatic victim, the film highlights victimization as the collective human condition. Yet, as an imperfect victim—specifically, a victim who victimizes—Brando’s Rio also modeled a type with special resonance for Americans, at a time when national values were increasingly under challenge at home (the civil rights movement) and abroad (the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam). The moral and political power of the antihero evolved during the 1960s and ’70s: a figure whose claim for protection was based in part on flaws and failings. Brando supplied a classic variation on this in Rio. His loneliness makes him vulnerable to Malden’s gregarious Dad Longworth and also provokes his wrath in response to Dad’s betrayal. His violation of Dad’s stepdaughter expresses his vulnerability and will, as does his subsequent love for her. Moreover, all the characters in One-Eyed Jacks are (in Dad’s words) “lying faster than a dog can trot.” To live is to lie; no one survives without it. Those who can forgive others’ deceptions—significantly women (Maria forgives her daughter, Louisa; Louisa forgives her lover, Rio)—are blessed. But this doesn’t preclude their suffering. Among men, an uncompromising Darwinism prevails. They respect only the power to kill, deferring to the quickest on the draw. Rio is the dominant male feared by everyone, until Dad flogs him publicly and pulverizes his gun hand. Rio’s symbolic castration by his father figure makes him powerless and a liability as far as other men are concerned. He can regain his manhood only by killing Dad.
The psychological implications seem almost too overt. Brando’s callous, miserly father, hovering over the film in the role of a Pennebaker executive, is apparently oblivious to his son’s talent and effort. Yet the son never stops trying to prove his worth to the father. Brando’s West is a dark fantasy where fathers unman their sons. Human bonds are imperiled and cannot grow in man’s desultory world. A spark in another person is threatening. The only source of relief is a bitter but enlivening humor. Dad caught in bed by Mexican police, escaping barefoot; Rio snatching the ring off the finger of the woman during the aborted seduction; gunmen who haven’t bathed for weeks, complaining about the rank smell of a fishing village: “Phew! What’s that?” “Something dead. . . .”
One-Eyed Jacks is also visually beautiful. The continuous presence of nature—sea, desert, woods, animals—whether mild or tumultuous, affirms the possibility of growth and freedom, which is unavailable to the human characters. One-Eyed Jacks pays homage to Dodie Brando’s love of nature, which she transmitted to her son along with her dramatic gifts. There is awe in the spectacle of mountains in the desert, woods beside ocean; both exist in tension with human society. The only good happens against this backdrop: Rio and Modesto after their jailbreak, framed by a desert sunset illuminating the land and sky; Rio shivering with pain from Dad’s beating, tended gently by Modesto amid sea boulders miraculously enlarged; the lovers’ passionate kiss before rolling waves. Each scene elevates the human beings, magnifying their actions. That is the effect of Brando’s artistry; he depicts life through a most brutal realism but reveals it in a larger context, the vastness and mystery of nature.
Brando’s nephew, Martin Asinof, remembers Brando taking the family to a private screening of One-Eyed Jacks after a holiday dinner. Overcome by the violence of the scene where Brando’s “Kid” is brutally whipped and mutilated by Karl Malden’s “Dad,” Martin’s mother, Jocelyn, leapt out of her seat, and Franny’s teenage daughter, Julie, burst into tears. Brando came over and sat down next to Julie, putting his arm around her and reminding her that Karl was his good friend and would never hurt him, holding up his hand to reassure her that it was perfectly fine, that this was only a movie. But there was no question that “Pop,” as Asinof and his cousins called Brando Sr., was a “very hard man,” a “nasty man,” who left his three children with “a lot of toxic baggage.”22
Brando’s account of how he learned in 1965 on a Navajo Reservation in Arizona of his seventy-year-old father’s death is revealing. Brando Sr. had been ill with melanoma, so it couldn’t have been entirely unexpected when a clairvoyant old medicine woman pronounced Brando an orphan. Moments later, a phone call for him at the reservation office confirmed the revelation. That night, as he drifted off to sleep, Brando had “a vision of [his father] walking down a sidewalk away from me, then turning around to look at me, a slump-shouldered Willy Loman with a faint smile on his face. When he got to the edge of eternity, he stopped and looked back again, turned halfway toward me and, with his eyes downcast, said: I did the best I could, kid. He turned away again, and I knew he was looking for my mother.”23
The scene captures the sense of ambivalence, resignation, and failure that characterized th
e relationship of father and son. The smile hints at Marlon Sr.’s triumph as he heads off into eternity with the mother, leaving the son bereft on earth. In his autobiography, Brando also described leaving the hospital in Pasadena on the spring morning of his mother’s death at the age of fifty-five: “She was gone, but I felt she had been transformed into everything that was reflective of nature and was going to be all right. Suddenly I had a vision of a great bird climbing into the sky higher and higher . . . a majestic bird floating on thermals of warm air, gliding higher and higher past a great stone cliff. I keep my mother’s ring close to me. For a long while after she died, the stone was vibrant and full of color, pigmented with deeper and deeper shades of blue, but recently I’ve noticed that the colors have begun to fade. . . . I don’t know why.”24 Brando’s comments suggest a conviction of maternal vulnerability that overwhelms his own sense of loss. He seems more concerned about his dead mother (“she . . . was going to be all right”) than about his own profound grief, grateful for the death he conceives as a bird’s soaring liberation.
Then there is the mother’s ring, echoing the metaphor of theft and deception in One-Eyed Jacks. Perhaps the real one escaped the complex taint of the one in the movie. Its fading may mean diminishing resentment toward a mother–son relationship that was so conflicted. Time dulls pain, and it dulls brightness. Fading colors also represent the human condition—the son coming to terms with old age.
In making One-Eyed Jacks, an experience that summoned to an exceptional degree his talents for acting, dialogue, and cinematography, Brando must have felt at times that he was taking a stab at immortality, for himself and for the mother whose memory it honored. In a letter of April 12, 1960, Brando called One-Eyed Jacks “one of the sizeable efforts in my life,” to which he had given “two and a half years of worry, anxiety, striving, discouragement, hopes, and work, work, work,” a rare confession that he qualifies in the next paragraph: “Of course, you must understand that I realize One-Eyed Jacks is simply another Hollywood movie which isn’t going to change the face of circumstance for anybody in this world.”25 The negation reinforced the confession and seemed more a reminder to himself than to anyone else. Films are not life; they don’t improve things for the suffering multitudes. He chides himself for having thought otherwise.
Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work Page 17