Brando’s next major role was in The Chase (1966), a suitable counterpart to The Ugly American. In conception at least, it was to take as firm a stand on domestic racial politics as the earlier film had taken on global issues.20 In The Chase, as in The Ugly American, Brando played a public official, his first sheriff, a good man in impossible circumstances, where any move was bound to go wrong.
THE CHASE
Brando’s national and global activism had always been of a piece. During a televised Civil Rights Roundtable with James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Charlton Heston, and Joseph Mankiewicz, following Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Brando was unique in using the occasion to connect American racism to international events, such as the Nazi genocide of Jews in the 1940s and America’s 1962 suspension of aid to Haiti.21 Brando’s reading and travels helped him to recognize the general similarity of racist motivations and violence, while seeing their particular destructive impact. Books he read during or after The Ugly American would have been applicable to The Chase as well. Taya Zinkin’s Caste Today (1963) and Ronald Segal’s The Anguish of India (1965), which offered international accounts of caste and class prejudice, assisted Brando’s analysis of American civil rights, just as his reading about Indians in the Americas, inspired by Emiliano Zapata’s Mexican-Indian roots, affected his thinking about American diplomacy in Southeast Asia for The Ugly American and race relations in Texas for The Chase. A reminder to himself on the back cover of Francis Paul Prucha’s American Indian Policy in the Formative Years (1962)—“cross-check legal obligations of South Africa and U.S. to indigenous people in separate enclosure within their territories and Panama and Cuba—Okinawa, Guam, and Marshall Islands”—foregrounds his habit of thinking globally about local affairs.22
Brando’s reading around this time was also rich in democratic political philosophy: The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison (eighty-five essays by Founding Fathers about the American Constitution designed to promote an informed citizenry essential to a healthy democracy), and Mortimer Adler’s The Development of Political Theory and Government (1959). There was probably no book that meant more to him than Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’s America Challenged (1960). Douglas criticized the reign of conformity since World War II. He believed that the fear of Communism prevented careful study of the USSR, an important new competitor, and that the impact of the media discouraged thoughtful debate and dissent.23 Brando saw in Douglas a genuinely sympathetic public intellectual and arranged a meeting with him to discuss American Indian affairs.24 In America Challenged, Douglas put forward the principles of revolutionary freedom and respect for cultural minorities, the foundation of a “great moral tradition.” This tradition was the backbone of average citizens like Brando’s Sheriff Calder of The Chase, who defended the persecuted in the name of national values ignored by the white majority. Brando could have drawn on many of his own public statements for Sheriff Calder’s views. As he told an interviewer for Ebony in 1963, “One of the amusing things about this country and many of its leaders” is that “they are always talking about the under-educated world and the under-educated Negro; that he is not suited to govern himself because he is under-educated. But to my way of thinking, the Negro is an over-educated person . . . he knows the meaning of democracy better than most other Americans. He knows the meaning of the Bill of Rights and what civil rights means. He knows what the spirit of this country is as it was constitutionally written, because he has had so little of it extended to him. I think that his knowledge about what is really useful and meaningful about our principles of government is infinitely greater than that of any corresponding white group.”25
As a man of law, Calder is a departure for Brando, who invests him with his signature ambivalence and charm. He also perfected, in his studied way, a genuine Texas accent. The Chase’s setting is an uneasy cauldron of cultural groups: oppressed blacks, oil barons and middle-class managers, poor whites, Mexican migrants, and immigrants. Notes and script commentary show that Brando’s goal was to amplify this clash of cultures: Sheriff Calder would have a Mexican wife and half-Mexican daughter a class above their migrant brethren, who are servants and seasonal laborers, and the black community would be equally diverse. Recalling his documentation of California’s multiculturalism in One-Eyed Jacks, he encouraged an emphasis on Texas’s regional marginality. “Almost all Texans speak Spanish,” Brando wrote in notes on the script next to a white Texan’s stumbling Spanish encounter with Mexicans, “especially if they live on the border.” White society, conceived by Brando, was also internally complex: small-town Texans, whose primary diversion was weekend carousing, versus the more cosmopolitan activities of the urbanites from nearby Houston. This group included the elite, like bank president Val Rogers—whose disapproval of his son Jake’s (James Fox) penniless sweetheart has resulted in Jake’s loveless marriage to a woman of their own class—as well as the middle-class types who throw their own drunken revels but also socialize with the lower echelons at Sol’s Café. At the bottom of the social scale is the Reeves clan: Sol’s stepdaughter, Anna (Jane Fonda), who is married to the hard-luck “Bubber” Reeves (Robert Redford), the only town miscreant in prison.
On set, 1965, in The Chase. Rex USA.
The Chase is more violent than The Ugly American, but the violence of both films shares a common source in misguided social policies and the festering injustices they foster. Although Texas in The Chase has never outgrown its Wild West origins, it also foreshadows key aspects of the state in the twenty-first century, with its illegal Mexican immigrants (escaped convict Bubber confronting them in a cattle car), nouveau riche oil elites (they challenge each other in pledges to the local college), and pervasive weaponry (Calder asserts, “The state of Texas says any man can own a gun, and most of you got two, but deputies you ain’t!”). Meanwhile, self-respecting blacks quietly pursue social mobility, while a black underclass remains the perennial scapegoat. Critics found most of the Southern whites caricatures, and Brando, in his “Random Notes on the Script,” complained about the vague motivations of Sheriff Calder, whom he called “the old lamplighter” (“in as much as it largely falls to him to meander through the story and illuminate the plot points”).26 Such flaws did not prevent the esteem of serious film critics, nor the picture’s immense popularity in Europe, and increasing appeal over time at home.
Brando had an empathetic director in Arthur Penn and a strong supporting cast in Fonda, Redford, E. G. Marshall, Angie Dickinson, James Fox, and Robert Duvall, among others. But he found the script as flawed as that of The Ugly American, despite its author, renowned playwright Lillian Hellman. Moreover, the pivotal member of the enterprise, to the film’s detriment, was Sam Spiegel, whose editing independent of the director resulted, according to Penn, in the cutting of Brando’s best scenes as he improvised around overly expository dialogues.27 Brando’s freedom on Penn’s set had to do with the fundamental compatibility of their perspectives. Penn shared the actor’s sensual approach to expression, and, like other directors with whom Brando enjoyed working, encouraged his inventive use of props, camera angles, and even recording speeds. Cinema historian Robin Wood saw a preoccupation with physical reality as the essence of Penn’s direction, noting how he dwelled on the physicality of people and their surroundings.28 The parallels to Brando’s own instinctive methods were pronounced. Brando’s Sheriff Calder, accused of subservience to Val Rogers, is forever polishing—a riding saddle, his shoes—and wiping his hands—he always seems to have a handkerchief—gestures that make manifest his disgust and his eagerness to abandon the unsavory job and town.
Partly because of Spiegel’s deleterious editing, Penn never quite considered The Chase his own.29 Moreover, Brando was Brando no matter who directed him, and his Sheriff Calder resonates with some of his most arresting work on film. At Val Rogers’s dinner party, Calder sniffs a petal to conceal his irritation, which anticipates the moment in The Godf
ather when Don Corleone sniffs a rose to punctuate the claim that, “after all, we’re not murderers.” When Calder, brooding, cups a pipe, inspecting the bowl as if seeking wisdom in tobacco leaves, Brando recalls Ambassador MacWhite, who steadies himself, pipe in hand, after his strategy fails. In another parallel to The Ugly American where Brando first appears from behind, bent over a briefcase on the point of his Senate testimony, a semi-moon that foregrounds the risks of the Southeast Asia venture, Brando’s sheriff bends over a water cooler in his office, just before outlining to Jane Fonda’s Anna Reeves the grave risk he has taken in not summoning trigger-happy backup to hunt her husband. The dangers of enforcing the law alone are realized when townies, enraged by his protection of blacks and criminals, beat him bloody in that same office.
Brando’s creative use of film technology in The Chase’s beating scene renders symbolic the sacrificial victimization experienced by many of his protagonists. It is widely known that the slow-motion scene where Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are gunned down in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) initiated a new form of cinematic violence.30 Few, however, are aware that Brando’s innovation in The Chase the year before is the source of this revolutionary method—a fact confirmed by Brando’s notes on the film and that Penn admitted publicly after the actor’s death. Recognizing in the beating of the sheriff an extreme reversal of authority requiring distinctive treatment, Brando suggested speeding up the camera to create the effect of slow motion, a method that made the beating, as Brando put it, “the objective correlative of the film as a whole.” Penn used the same technique in Bonnie and Clyde and made film history.
Disdainful of conventional approaches to violence in movies, choreographed to belie bodily suffering, Brando wanted audiences to feel the sadism and awkwardness of an actual brawl. “Remind me to talk to you about the fight,” he wrote to Penn during production. “The beating could be done, possibly—in an interesting, not often used, maybe unprecedented technique.” “The idea was his,” Penn confessed in an interview. “Marlon said to me, ‘If we’re going to do this scene, let’s really do it until the brutality is boring.’. . . Instead of throwing movie punches he said, ‘How about if we really hit each other but we shoot it at twenty frames instead of twenty-four?’ They really are punching him. The action was filmed at slow speed but then projected at regular speed. You see the fists land and the distortion of flesh, just like in real fights. It worked like a dream.”31
Brando sought realism as well in depicting the courage of Southern blacks in the civil rights movement. “Let’s just see once a Negro represented as a stud. These kids face death every day down there,” he wrote. A Southern judge would help to dramatize the legal corruption that sustained white supremacy, and Val Rogers could tell Lester, the poor black man he badgers for information, “I’m going to kill you . . . and there isn’t a judge in this county who’ll say I can’t and you know it.” Brando cites the trampling of law in the case of the three civil rights workers whose murders were never prosecuted because “the society magistrate . . . threw the confession out as not substantial enough.” Political honesty and dramatic authenticity were not mutually exclusive, Brando insisted, as he tirelessly prodded Lillian Hellman (in script commentary) to improve the characterization and plotting. “Another essay,” he writes on the November 6, 1964, script. “These people are cartoons.” How can the whole town fear the return of escaped convict Bubber, when he appears as “a creampuff”? The same goes for Val Rogers—“nobody breathes in that town without a certificate from Val Rogers”—a clout discredited by his “limp wrists and fluttering eyelids.” The weakness of these leading catalysts destroys the story’s credibility and the purpose of Brando’s Sheriff Calder, who “has no conflict, he’s just floundering.”
Though many of these problems were never resolved, Brando, Penn, and the talented cast produced a respectable film that spoke to some of the most prominent tensions of the era. Once again Brando ad-libbed some of the picture’s best lines: (in response to Emily’s, “Why don’t you stick around and help us protect him”) “With all the pistols you got there Emily, I don’t believe there’d be room for mine”; (to Ruby) “Some of those people out there are just nuts; they’re just nuts . . . I gotta lock a man up here, who didn’t do a damn thing, just to keep those maniacs from killin’ him; they’re not interested in doin’ nothin’ but gettin’ drunk and makin’ trouble. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of livin’ here, I’m sick of this job!”; (to his deputy, inquiring about an assignment) “Forget it! Just keep drivin’ around. And turn off that party hat!”—the flashing siren. (Italics indicate words stressed by Brando.) Against a backdrop of sexual competition, betrayal, and greed, Brando’s sheriff and his wife are decent people who resist excess and the despair that follows. The oasis embodied by the golden-haired Calders is reinforced by their dress, which highlights their affinity to each other and separation from the community. Before the beating, Ruby wears a red sweater over the taupe blouse and skirt that matches her husband’s uniform, thus predicting his imminent cloaking in blood. Calder’s surrender to violence at the end is an act of self-division, for he must thrust Ruby aside to pummel Bubber’s killer, Archie. That momentary suspension of morality signals the necessity of Calder’s departure.
“Violence is a subject that an artist who is intuitively and intellectually alive to the world in which he exists can scarcely avoid today; and if there is a more responsible treatment of it anywhere in the cinema, I have yet to see it.”32 Thus, film historian Robin Wood concludes his admiring account of The Chase. Wood was thinking of Archie’s shooting of Bubber, echoing Jack Ruby’s 1963 murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, but he might have had in mind the correspondence between the riots in Watts, a nearby Los Angeles ghetto, and The Chase’s final conflagration.33 The Chase’s focus on race problems in the South could only have seemed ironic when Watts erupted on August 11—nine days after The Chase’s final scene was shot—and burned for five days. The trigger was a black man’s arrest for drunk driving, but the underlying cause was decades of discrimination in housing, schooling, and employment. Brando, Penn, and others working on the film knew that the South was less unique in its institutionalization of racism than many were prepared to admit. Indeed, Brando made this very point at a CORE rally on August 22, 1963, in Gadsden, Alabama, protesting job discrimination.
Violence did not preclude beauty, and The Chase was above all visually striking, its Western swamplands and rolling hills providing, as it had in Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks, a respite from human society. The Calders are identified with nature in their yearning for the paternal farm they hope to recover from oil speculators. A wild horse in their headlights, after an early departure from Val Rogers’s party, foreshadows their return to the land at the film’s end, in a black car confirming Calder’s resignation as sheriff. That Jeffersonian prospect remained an answer of sorts to the corrosive society pictured in the film.
REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE
The Ugly American, The Chase, and Reflections in a Golden Eye offered unique angles on the tumultuous 1960s, and each of Brando’s characters had his own relationship to the prevailing violence. Ambassador MacWhite, thoughtful but arrogant, acts precipitously in a setting where the slightest miscalculation ignites a war; Sheriff Calder repudiates action but his town erupts anyway; Major Weldon Penderton in Reflections in a Golden Eye internalizes the violence and redirects it against helpless alter egos—a runaway horse and an army private. Violence in Reflections is sexual and also unspoken. With the exception of Montgomery Clift in Suddenly Last Summer (1959), Brando was the first leading American actor to play a homosexual on film, impotent and closeted, with an aggressively adulterous wife (Elizabeth Taylor). Suffused in a golden hue, the film was set on an army base during peacetime, an environment that made its repressed protagonist exemplary rather than exceptional.
There are obvious differences between Brando’s Sheriff Calder and his Major Penderton—realized heterosexuality versus stif
led homosexuality, Texas lawman versus Georgia officer, spousal loyalty versus cuckoldry—as well as commonalities. Both are observers alienated from macho models of manhood; instinctively opposed to volatility, they would choose deliberation over violence. Yet both are smoldering and explode when pushed to the edge. The Chase and Reflections in a Golden Eye share the distinction of having involvement by significant women authors from the South—Lillian Hellman and Carson McCullers, respectively. Hellman wrote The Chase screenplay, based on a novel by Horton Foote. McCullers wrote the novella on which Reflections was based. Still, the women were largely responsible for shaping the films and Brando’s roles in them. Hellman receives exclusive credit for the screenplay of The Chase, and McCullers’s novella was barely altered from book to film.34
Brando’s respect for McCullers was evident in the unusually small number of revisions he introduced into the script, and from script to screen. He deleted only one scene, which was in both novel and original screenplay: Major Penderton squeezing a kitten into a mailbox and striding away from its “piteous mews.”35 Stella Adler noted about Brando that “nothing human was foreign to him,” but she also recalled his extraordinary sensitivity to animals. “I’d rather die,” he told her once, “than hurt anything alive.”36 Brando, apparently, could not find it in himself to play a man who would commit such an act, especially at a time when such scenes could not be faked to prevent harming an animal. The dramatic necessity of the horsewhipping scene was clear, and that was concession enough. Even when he played soldiers and gunfighters, Brando made a point of killing rarely in his films, which makes the blood lust of his late villains—the assassin in The Missouri Breaks or the prison warden in Free Money—truly distinct.
The most noteworthy aspect of Brando’s performance was his embodiment of Major Penderton, the way he transformed himself physically into an instrument of unrequited love and loneliness. Forty-two at the time of the production, he managed to collapse his natural vigor and athleticism into the flaccid awkwardness of a man entirely at odds with himself. The major is not particularly fat, but Brando makes him seem hulking, boneless, to reflect the man’s incoherence, the chasm between his buried passions and his public persona as a successful married officer. Brando’s Penderton flounders porpoiselike in his uniform, his head and legs and arms flapping extensions of a body that doesn’t know its purpose. He walks with a rigid care, as if the ground might open suddenly and swallow him whole. Above all, he seems offended by the surrounding sounds, smells, and sights. His perpetually raised chin displays a resolve to live above the senses. Yet he has small, secretive pleasures. His head hangs seductively over the treasures he keeps locked in his desk drawer in a truss box: a postcard of a male nude and a spoon stolen from Captain Weincheck, another officer, also apparently a closeted homosexual, with a taste for Proust and classical music.
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