For Brando, the Pitcairn Islands sequence raised questions about the good society: Under conditions where human needs were satisfied, and people were able to live interdependently on relatively equal terms, how could the eruption of conflict be explained? The failure of such a utopia must stem from factors in human nature. This part of the Mutiny story provided an opportunity for exploring the problems that human beings brought to every type of social and political system throughout history.
Of his ambition to focus on the experience of the mutineers on Pitcairn, Brando wrote, “They should have found great happiness. And what happened? Within two years they were dead; they had killed one another. In that bit of tragedy I saw a microcosm of all man’s history, his losing battle with the urge to destroy. I saw a vivid and terrifying moral—if an island paradise holds no happiness, creates no love of life, perhaps man can never find it.”56
The will on the part of some to dominate others, to impose their own culture or eliminate those who think or believe differently—the source of such tendencies was of great interest to Brando. Thus, another contemporary controversy about which he read deeply while he was working on Mutiny was the highly publicized arrest and trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal captured in Argentina in the spring of 1960 and prosecuted in Israel in the spring of 1961. Brando had Henry Zeiger’s The Case Against Adolf Eichmann (1960) and Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel’s Dr. Goebbels: His Life and Death (1961), as well as Hannah Arendt’s contemporary coverage of the trial in The New Yorker, which became Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), of which he owned multiple copies.
But he could have drawn on any number of books in his library for themes and ideas in Mutiny. Among pertinent works with contemporary publication dates were: Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1962); André Niel, Krishnamurti: The Man in Revolt (1957); Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death (1959); and Michael Curtis, The Great Political Theories: From Plato and Aristotle to Locke and Montesquieu (1961).57 Brando was adept at making a theory accessible through physical or verbal means. The omnipresent annotation in his books, “dio,” short for “dialogue,” was a reminder to himself to draw on the phrase or statement for a film.58 Brando owned four of Bronislaw Malinowski’s anthropology classics on Melanesia. He highlighted a passage in Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1953) on the “innumerable forms of courtship and marriage,” how “types of wooing and winning vary with each culture,” which might have shaped his approach as Fletcher Christian to Tarita Teriipaia’s Maimiti.59
Brando was himself an anthropologist of sorts, a natural outgrowth of his curiosity and appetite for travel. This ethnographic bent was especially pronounced in his relationships with women. He seems to have had a knack for transforming any romantic occasion into a symbolic interaction. He knew that symbolism was essential to eroticism: how meaningful every sound, look, and touch could be. Fluent in the silent language that ruled sexual encounters, Brando always eliminated excess chatter from these scenes.60 There was no actor who made love on camera more seductively.
The first meeting of Christian and Miamiti (Tarita Teriipaia) becomes a primer on cross-cultural romance that could stand for any initial intimacy. It begins with eye contact during the woman’s provocative dance, performed in a scant wrapping that exposes much of her body. Her unmistakable advance and his unmistakable interest are followed by her wandering away with backward glances to ensure he marks her course. The embodiment of civilization—naval officer in blue coat with gold buttons, white ruffled shirt, and white knickers—glides slowly toward his prey, his countenance glowing with desire. Miamiti announces her whereabouts with a titter; he nears the bush that conceals her. He gently displaces the foliage to reveal the Tahitian woman, her gaze averted. “Hello,” he says softly, his British accent caressing the word, as he enters her hiding place. His every move is calibrated. The woman introduces herself in Tahitian. He thumps his chest, pronouncing his name. Her misunderstanding yields a smiling concession to “call me whatever you like.” “How very sweet,” he says, responding to her love custom. He leans in for a kiss that is met with a Tahitian-style brushing of noses; he accepts, amused, before guiding her firmly into his own love game.
Flirting on the set of Mutiny. High-resolution image courtesy of Alexander Khochinskiy.
Throughout the production, in script revisions, and most of all through his ambivalent gentleman mutineer, Brando sought to invest entertainment with ideas, inviting audiences to confront cultural contrasts and class conflict. Aboard ship, when Christian struggles with sailors to secure water barrels broken loose during a storm, Brando demonstrates how an officer working alongside his men can balance authority with humane concern for their welfare. Critics singled out the scene for its thrilling realism.61 Convinced that viewers would share his fascination with island rituals, he made certain they were portrayed in detail. “Create beauty of Tahiti, people, customs, life,” he urged in his notes, “let’s not stop for a travelogue.”62 Hence the ceremonious greeting given Bligh and his entourage, featuring the inhabitants pouring onto the beach and showering officers and crew with flower wreaths, and the extended fishing scene where Tahitian men in boats flog the water, driving their prey into nets held by rows of women.
Brando’s best acting comes during the life-changing events for his character—the mutiny and its aftermath. Christian’s bold usurpation of power and then retrospective sorrow for all he has lost is made a piece with his previous self-satisfaction. He lashes out against Bligh’s kick with aristocratic outrage, uttering his first oath, “You bloody bastard! You’ll not put your foot on me again!” and seizes command with similar propriety, stabbing Bligh in the left arm to draw blood and warn Bligh’s backers that his challenge is serious. “You remarkable pig,” he declares, glaring at Bligh. “You can thank whatever pig-god you pray to that you haven’t quite turned me into a murderer!” (Italics indicate words stressed by Brando.) He confronts the enormity of his deed with equal dignity, sitting alone in the captain’s cabin with his legs taut and his back as straight as a British schoolboy’s, as if good posture can restore the order shattered by mutiny. At no point does Christian betray his upbringing; his refinement persists through his last breath, as he dies from burns suffered in an effort to save the flaming ship. This was another of Brando’s extraordinary death scenes, which he directed himself (Carol Reed had been fired by the producers early in 1961 and replaced by Lewis Milestone, who soon became disgruntled with the chaotic production), lying on a bed of ice to simulate the shuddering fear aroused by the recognition that death is imminent.
Brando climbing Bounty’s rigging. High-resolution image courtesy of Alexander Khochinskiy.
Critics from Variety and the Associated Press considered this “the finest performance of [Brando’s] career.” Though there were reservations (The New Yorker: Brando “plays Fletcher Christian as a sort of seagoing Hamlet”), most were favorably impressed.63 Apart from the New York Times and The New Yorker, whose writers preferred the 1935 version, reactions to Mutiny were almost uniformly positive. A leading box-office grosser for months, the film was nominated for Academy Awards in seven categories, including Best Picture. This was remarkable given the negative publicity surrounding the production. Like another early blockbuster, Cleopatra (1963), starring Elizabeth Taylor, tall tales of extravagance and celebrity malfeasance dogged Mutiny, centering on its expense, a figure estimated at between $18.5 million and $30 million, depending on the source and its attitude toward Brando.64 An article in the Saturday Evening Post, June 16, 1962, subtitled “The Mutiny of Marlon Brando,” blamed delays and cost overruns on “a petulant superstar” who turned “Paradise into a moviemaker’s nightmare.” The Post piece resulted in all-time-high newsstand sales for the magazine, which boasted a circulation of 6,500,000. This was the first time in the Post’s 234-year history that a film star had ever appeared on its cover.65 The article was so scurrilous that Brando not only sued the magazine for libel (settled in his favor out of cour
t) but also accepted magazine and television interviews to tell his side of the story. “If you send a multimillion dollar production to a place when, according to the precipitation records it is the worst time of the year, and when you send it without a script, it seems there is some kind of primitive mistake. The reason for all of the big failures is the same—no script. Then the actor becomes the obvious target of executives trying to cover their own tracks.” Brando might have added “no ship,” for Canadian shipbuilders were months behind in delivering the Bounty replica to Tahiti and fifty percent above estimated construction costs.66
Mutiny on the Bounty had two major consequences for Brando: First, it motivated him to respond to critical news coverage. As the ultimate informed citizen, he was a lifelong reader of newspapers. Up until the end, he read the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times daily.67 He followed the press on his career religiously, as evidenced by his collection of magazine and newspaper articles dating from the beginning of his time in Hollywood, but he made a habit of not responding. This changed after Bounty, which coincided with the births of his first three children (Christian in 1958—mother Anna Kashfi; Miko in 1960—mother Movita Castaneda; Teihotu in 1963—mother Tarita Teriipaia). Recognizing that his image would affect them, he began to respond to distorted or libelous portrayals.68
His willingness to talk on live interview shows in the months between the release of Mutiny on the Bounty and his work on The Ugly American reflected both his new concern for his reputation as well as a longstanding interest in the political role of media. He owned dozens of books on the subject and was a regular reader of the journal published by the Gannett Center for Media Studies. Brando’s foiled attempt in 1968 to take a free-speech case to the California Supreme Court, after he was charged with defamation by the Los Angeles Police Department for remarks he made on a talk show following the death of Black Panther Bobby Hutton, made clear his conversance with these laws.69 Interviews Brando gave in the wake of Mutiny demonstrated that his early indoctrination into the mixed blessings of an American free press with First Amendment protections had motivated serious study and reflection. They also reveal the growing opposition in his mind between a competitive, publicity-hungry American entertainment world that continually invaded his privacy and the isolated, relatively equable culture of Tahiti, whose inhabitants were mostly unmoved by fame and treated him with a welcome informality.
Chess on the Bounty set. High-resolution image courtesy of Alexander Khochinskiy.
In an April 19, 1963, interview with Hugh Downs on the Today Show, Brando displayed his usual learning and eloquence as he discussed the advantages and disadvantages of a free press and the distinction between print journalism and live-broadcast news. Characterizing “gossip” as “a multimillion dollar industrial complex,” he noted that he had been treated as “an enemy of the people” for protecting his private life. Still he vigorously defended the First Amendment. “They don’t have it in Russia, they don’t have it in France, they have a lot of trouble in Germany with it. There are very few countries in the world where you really can say something, and the press has got an absolute right to make a critical comment about anyone or anything.” He goes on to distinguish magazines and newspapers (where interviews can be distorted through misquoting, juxtaposition, and editorializing) from live television (where views can be conveyed uncensored). “I don’t think people realize what television has done, what this kind of program does. . . . Television wins and loses elections for a very special reason, because not only do people see what you say, but they see what you feel.” Magazines, in contrast, can have an “official interpretation” that columnists are expected to support. He cited Time magazine’s prejudice against Tennessee Williams, who he felt had been excoriated in thinly disguised homophobic reviews. Explaining that he no longer was giving interviews to Time, he said that the magazine was also responsible, in a prime example of “Ugly Americanism,” for deadly riots in Bolivia in 1959.
A few days later, on April 21, on David Susskind’s Open End, Brando was more direct about his experiences with the press. “I have withstood wrath, hatred, disregard, vulgarity, insults, for years and years and years . . . that I’ve never bothered to say anything about, because libel laws in this country are famously weak, and it’s to the advantage of a magazine that you sue it, because they make money in advertising that compensates for what they might lose in the suit.” But “there comes a time when you have to pick up a tin can and turn around and fling it with a will, and especially at a time when I have two children growing up in this community.” Brando didn’t mention the third child, due the following month in Tahiti, the second consequence of Mutiny. But his comments about Tahiti on Open End suggested high hopes that this child might experience his due measure of tranquillity.
Brando’s preoccupation with the fate of the mutineers would prove to be somewhat prophetic. Though he would have thirty years of relative contentment on Tetiaroa, the coral-reef atoll he bought in 1967 near Papeete, he would also discover the limits of happiness there. His perspective on the mutineers’ experiences in their own utopia shows that he had the wisdom to anticipate this, which did not, of course, enable him to control events.
What Brando found in Tahiti was an absence of all things American: materialism and competitiveness, assimilation and cooptation, preoccupation with mobility and glamour. As he told David Susskind: “To me it’s an extremely attractive place because of all the places I’ve been it’s the most democratic. They don’t care who you are, they don’t care what you do or what you represent, as long as you’re decent and generally kind and interested in dancing and the things that they’re interested in, then you’re completely accepted, and if you’re not, it doesn’t matter how much money you have or what your influence is, they couldn’t care less. . . . They have a lot of trouble with their teeth, but they don’t care. If when they smile they’ve got five teeth, that’s enough.” Yet Brando’s Tahitian is no jolly native. “Tahitians are tough, they’re realistic, absolutely realistic. It’s not rare to see a man and a woman fighting. . . . I’ve seen five fights break out in a period of three minutes. Break out like matches falling from a building, just flare right up.” Above all, he admired Tahitian tenacity, which he illustrated with reference to the fate of Chinese culture there. Throughout the world, “in New York or San Francisco or London or Jakarta, wherever you find it it’s intact. You know that these people are Chinese, and they speak Chinese, and they evaluate situations in the way that most Chinese would, and you never see that cracked. . . . But in Tahiti, it’s the only place in Southeast Asia where I’ve ever been where I’ve seen the Chinese culture split right down the middle. The Tahitians gave a knuckle sandwich to the Chinese culture that’s going to last for the next thousand years. The older Chinese think that the younger Chinese are staying home and taking care of the accounts and . . . they’re out . . . dancing the tamure . . . they have Tahitian boyfriends and girlfriends, and it’s just riddled with disintegration. . . . The Tahitians have withstood blackbirding [Polynesian enslavement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for labor on Australian sugar and cotton plantations], they’ve withstood fifteen different kinds of missionaries, they’ve withstood the English and the French and the American tourist, the New Zealand tourist and all kinds of exploitation, and . . . they remain with their unassailable identities.”70
Brando worried about the impact of modern technology, but his belief in Tahitian resilience lasted to the end of his life. “The Tahitian soul lives, it’s extant and vibrant,” he said in 1993, adding that he wanted his island Tetiaroa preserved as a “a place that reminds Tahitians of who they are and what they were years ago.”71 That Brando never lost hope in the potential for a better world was a sign of his own resilience. Such idealism was the motivating force behind his next film, The Ugly American, which had been one of the initial projects conceived for Pennebaker Productions.
Brando on Tetiaroa, 1970s. Reproduced by permission of Brando
Enterprises, LP.
CHAPTER FIVE
POLITICAL FILMS, 1963–1969
Brando’s challenge throughout the 1960s was to find productive avenues for his outsize talents and ambitions. He ended up feeling conflicted about many of his projects, whether because of the scale of the undertaking, his ambivalence toward the project, or the Hollywood system itself. It made sense for him to try directing in One-Eyed Jacks, and he might have continued in this vein had he enjoyed the exclusive responsibility for filmmaking and learned to delegate better. But Brando valued loyalty over ability in subordinates, a wrong choice when it comes to making films. Such dilemmas were the rule in Hollywood, but the scope of Brando’s success, his peripatetic lifestyle, and the range of his interests exacerbated them.1
This didn’t prevent him from pursuing his dreams, such as his island Tetiaroa, with its extraordinary natural resources and pristine condition. It became a respite from Hollywood and facilitated a devotion to the Tahitian nation that endured beyond his death.
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