THE MISSOURI BREAKS
Brando’s first film after Last Tango in Paris was The Missouri Breaks, directed by Arthur Penn, who had fostered an environment on The Chase that, despite the drawbacks of Hollywood studio production, freed Brando to do serious work.2 In The Missouri Breaks, Arthur Penn once again gave Brando the freedom to create a unique persona. Lee Clayton, the heartless assassin, would be one of Brando’s most self-consciously theatrical incarnations of evil. When Penn, Brando, and Jack Nicholson (who played rustler Tom Logan) convened in Montana during the summer of 1975, all agreed they had an intriguing screenplay that was, in the director’s words, “not filmable.” Brando’s character was particularly empty: “There is no Robert E. Lee Clayton,” he told Penn, “there just isn’t anyone here.”3 But Penn watched as a thinly sketched assassin, with minimal dialogue and human interaction, was transformed into the ultimate eccentric con man.
The best acting, according to Brando, is unpredictable, the actor keeping the audience perpetually expectant. Every scene presents a new possibility for deepening or even reimagining his character.4 In The Missouri Breaks, these assumptions become a theory of survival in the West, as his characterization supplies an otherwise meandering narrative with suspense and purpose. Without Lee Clayton, the film is a mere fight to the death between anarchic rustlers and self-righteous ranchers who value property more than human life. The opening scene confirms the ranchers’ perspective: The hanging of a horse thief is so routine that the families attending with picnic baskets barely hush during the swinging man’s final moments. The crowd’s reaction to the hanging anticipates its failure to deter rustlers, which is why Brando’s assassin is already en route. Specializing in innovative killing devices—including a circular spiked weapon that Brando invented to hurl through the air into the forehead of a rustler (Harry Dean Stanton)—Robert E. Lee Clayton demonstrates that endurance depends on a capacity for surprise worthy of the most skilled actors. Clayton is as literate as he is heartless. Meeting the ranch owner, David Braxton (John McLiam), who has hired him to eliminate the horse thieves threatening his profits, he is quick to admire the man’s library, offering a moralistic twist on its value. “I would only claim books,” he notes gravely, “that was about right from wrong. Otherwise, how are we to find our Paradise among the stars?”
Robert E. Lee Clayton in The Missouri Breaks. Newscom Services.
His Irish brogue and the sinister glint in his eye resemble that of The Nightcomer’s Peter Quint, though Clayton prefers his horse “Jess” to women, an unconventionality reinforced by a use of lavender cologne and strange costumes. The issue is not sexual preference so much as unorthodoxy combined with a dramatic ingenuity suited to survival. The ultimate actor, Clayton gets gratification from killing in disguise—once as a preacher, another time as a granny in dress and bonnet. The characterization tells an alternative story about the American West, highlighting the aberrant tendencies accommodated, if not exactly tolerated, by its lawless atmosphere. Until his entrance, when he’s hidden behind his beloved horse and pack mule, things seem rudderless. The hefty assassin’s arrival catalyzes the drama, and this remains true throughout as viewers await his next move.
Brando gives Clayton one of his loves: bird-watching. As a birder, Clayton traverses the splendid natural setting, book in hand, sounding out long Germanic names for the hawks and other airborne creatures he encounters. Brando had his own classics on the subject: in addition to weighty Audubon Society and National Geographic tomes—the 852-page Field Guide to North American Birds and Song and Garden Birds of North America—he had Birds of the World and such esoterica as The Observer’s Book of Birds’ Eggs and a 1947 volume that showed “Field Marks of All Species Found East of the Rockies.”5 Brando’s bird books, which date from the 1940s through the 1990s, reflect a genuine preoccupation. Nor are birds a passing fancy of the man-hunting Clayton, who divides people into groundlings and those who can fly. He tells Tom Logan, “I’m not the crawling kind.” In one scene, perched birdlike atop his horse, hair wrapped in a white kerchief to give him a bald bird pate, he mutters, “God, God, God,” alternately consulting his manual and peering through binoculars at the sky. Despite a capacity for awe, he is a predator (like the circling scavenger described in another of Brando’s books, Thomas Merton’s Zen and the Birds of Appetite). Clayton’s birding binoculars prove handy for tracking the rustlers he is contracted to kill.
Singing on the Missouri Breaks set with Nicholson, Kathleen Lloyd, and Stanton. Courtesy of MGM Media Licensing.
All are suspect as he shrewdly appraises people, his eyes and mouth active. He talks constantly (mostly to himself), chuckles, hums, sings, and chews—carrots, tobacco, game—using his teeth to cut leather, or disarming an antagonist with a smile. Complaining of a toothache at the funeral of the foreman whose death he is hired to avenge, he sends shock waves through the gathering by raising the corpse and grabbing ice from the coffin for his throbbing jaw. Brando transforms the obscure figure of the screenplay into a man who quotes Shakespeare to his horse and mule, a performer whose many disguises and accents—from the witty Irishman to the menacing country preacher—bespeak both learning and the malevolent emptiness at his core.6 The subject of killing inspires his highest pitches of eloquence. Consider this speech, improvised by Brando with an Irish lilt: “Supposing you had a barn full of nasty old bats, you wanted to get rid of them. Well, the worst thing you could do is just get your gun and just start shootin’ and bangin’ around. What good would it do you? It wouldn’t do a damn bit of good. They’d all leave and they’d be back by 7:30 in the morning. Now, if you want to get rid of a whole lot of evil bats, there’s only one way. And the way is this: you wait till the dawn comes about 4:30, and you’re waiting outside by the barrels there. And then, you close the door real quick, and all the bats are inside. And then while they’re sleeping, the lovely little sweethearts, you have every one of the dirty little buggers at your mercy. And that’s the only way you can do it.” Riding off into a splendid beclouded landscape, his beleaguered mule in tow, he adds to his horse with a flourish, “Come on now, Jess, we know when we’re not wanted. Let’s go out to the manhunt now.”
Clayton adores his horse and guns (his etched silver pistol, he says, is “like a poem”), but humans he can do without.7 Head rustler Tom Logan cuts his throat ultimately, but that doesn’t make Clayton’s side any less victorious. The ending anticipates a birth six months hence, for the West is nothing if not regenerative, its inhabitants worn down by the demands of survival but driven to replenish the surrounding wonder. Penn’s camera provides equal doses of lyricism and barbarism: the shrunken boy miner desperately serving a stranger for money; the farm wife selling her body to a horse thief so ignorant he’d never heard of Thomas Jefferson; the aging rustler mourning a boyhood dog shot for sticking its tongue on a pat of butter. Painfully particularized, yet full of humor, Penn’s West reciprocates Brando’s inventions more successfully than some reviewers recognized. For the film was itself heretical in portraying the cruelty of the West with so much sensitivity.
Brando’s participation in The Missouri Breaks generated the usual media attention, which he obliged with two in-depth interviews. “Brando: The Method of His Madness,” by Chris Hodenfield in Rolling Stone, exemplifies a skillful writer in pursuit of difficult prey. Despite his elusiveness, or perhaps because of it, Brando looms large here. Everything about him seems inflated: his pay ($1.25 million), his weight, and the way he throws it around. Yet Hodenfield also notes that crew members praised the actor whom prop man Guy Douglas called “their hero.”8 His other quotations are especially revealing. For instance, Bernardo Bertolucci’s remarks on how the actor “dominates space. Even if Brando is absolutely still, say, sitting on a chair,” he has assumed “that privileged space. And Brando’s attitude toward life is different from that of other people because of this fact.” Or Brando on cinema patrons: “People buy a ticket. That ticket is their transport to a fantasy which yo
u create for them. Fantasyland, that’s all, and you make their fantasies live. Fantasies of love or hatred or whatever it is. People want their fantasies over and over. People who masturbate usually masturbate with, at the most, four or five fantasies. . . . And that’s all films are. . . . Just an extension of childhood, where everybody wants to be freer, everybody wants to be powerful, everybody wants to be so overwhelmingly attractive.”9
Bruce Cook’s Crawdaddy piece reads like a continuation of the same conversation. “Brando is one of those figures in whom we invest our fantasies. If you are a woman, you ask yourself what it would be like to be made love to by such a man,” men wonder what it would be like “simply to be him.” The strange disconnect experienced by the object of fantasy is illuminated by Lord Byron’s response to a fan request “to know the real Lord Byron. ‘Madame . . . there is no real Lord Byron.’. . . It’s something you can imagine Brando saying, isn’t it?” Cook describes the Billings, Montana, natives and the film crew in residence there, reacting to a Hollywood idol. Above all, the reporter watches Brando. “Each time he did a take he managed to get a little something extra into it. This is a man who can act with his eyebrows, who will ad lib something in German—in German!—when he thinks the script could use a little spritz.”10 Cook can be forgiven for misidentifying the Hebrew (from the traditional Kaddish prayer for the dead) Brando mutters before bedding down the night he is killed.
A reviewer noted about the same scene that Brando’s compliment to his horse—you have “the lips of Salome and the eyes of Cleopatra”—“must be seen to be believed.” On the whole, contemporary reviewers found The Missouri Breaks bizarre, although the twin billing of Brando and Jack Nicholson attracted audiences. Judith Crist admired the film, which she called “a fascinating tale of complex characters, an engrossing duel between men of multilayered personality against a multidimensional time in history.” Brando, Crist wrote, “proves himself master of every nuance of controlled madness, each encounter revealing a new dimension of perverse righteousness and each, peculiarly, serving to expose a further weakness in the other person.” “His performance,” she concludes, evokes “an almost reflective revelation from others while keeping his own enigmatic persona intact.” Brando’s most negative review in the New York Times called the performance “out-of-control” and set the tone for press of the late period in suggesting that Brando “behaves like an actor in armed revolt.” Still, this revisionist Western, with its fine cinematography (by Michael C. Butler) and haunting score by John Williams, has aged well, with critics giving significantly more positive reviews on its DVD release.11
SUPERMEN AND NAZIS
The performance confirmed that Brando the actor, whether it was 1946 or 1976, couldn’t help but embrace risk. Acting was an imperiling procedure. Living was different. “I would like to conduct my life and be a part of a society that is as good as grass grows. I’d like to be a blade of grass in concert with other blades of grass.”12 A noble but difficult aim, when everyone insists on seeing you as a type of “Superman.” This may have been why Brando for his next movie simply threw in the towel and played one: specifically, Jor-El, the father of Kal-El, or Superman. Brando knew something about what awaited the son he sent to Earth; the experience of being “an object of adoration,” even idolatry; how “the normal relationships we all require will be denied you.” Other aspects of the role were also hospitable—for instance, Jor-El’s commitment to knowledge and its transmission to his son. The role was a father’s dream, but especially Brando’s, given his desire for an intellectual mastery he felt he had missed because of his resistance to formal schooling. His fascination with science was fulfilled by the chance to play a scientist—Jor-El’s profession was one Brando had imagined for himself.13
But if he was able to appreciate the idealistic aspects of his role in Superman, his realism was even more pronounced. Some saw the $2.7 million Brando earned for the film, with more ensured by a contract clause granting him 11.3 percent of the gross, as his capitulation to Hollywood greed. Brando’s defense of his right to share in the expansion of a multimillion-dollar industry was at least consistent. He had argued over the years that a star actor was no different from a professional athlete or any other commodity bought or sold in the marketplace. It was only fair that he receive a percentage of the profits his top billing had helped generate. Had Brando’s estimation of his own value been exaggerated, he suggested, his demands would have been refused. His participation gave Superman a respectability it would have lacked, and it attracted other talent. On set he proved, as usual, a favorite of cast and crew, with neophyte actor Christopher Reeve, in his first major role, especially grateful for the support Brando provided.14 While his pay distracted critics, they found him credible as the godlike patriarch of the great American superhero, despite his lines, which consisted of solemn oaths, mathematical theorems, philosophical principles, and Shakespearean sonnets. This may have been because Brando carefully pruned his character’s pronouncements, an option apparently unavailable to Russell Crowe, whose Jor-El in Man of Steel (2013) was chided by reviewers for talking too much.15
Brando’s British accent in the film distinguished him from the earthlings to whom he sent his child in a spaceship, a lone immigrant young enough that his speech would be as Americanized as that of the natives. Through personal touches, Brando was able to authenticate a role marked by rhetoric as inflated as his character’s powers, slipping in a familiar poem—for instance, Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”: “‘I think I will never see a poem as lovely as a tree . . . ,’ a typical ode much loved by the people you will live among, Kal-El.”16 Years later, Brando noted, “Even in Superman, a cartoon,” “there are universal moments,” among them, “Calling from the edge of eternity, giving guidance for his son. It worked because it calls up feelings inside of us.”17 It also helped that he was genuinely interested in the film’s futuristic world. As a regular reader of science magazines, and books on popular science and scientific ethics, he was familiar with the problems raised by innovation. He was also sufficiently pragmatic to recognize that technology required capital. A maverick who trusted his own mind, he would not miss an opportunity to make a point because a venture was commercial. What Brando seems to have valued above all was the opportunity for upending traditional authorities afforded by a new scientific age; he saw possibilities that people with enlightened ideas might have more say in social orders to come.
Throughout this late period, Brando sought to balance lucrative projects against those he did for idealistic purposes: the motivations behind Roots and A Dry White Season. While his late-career earnings were often vast, much of it went to legal fees for his son’s murder trial, the special needs of his troubled daughter, and causes he cared about. He lived modestly by Hollywood standards. His home on Mulholland Drive, valued in 1991 at $2.6 million, mostly for the location, was under 4,000 square feet, and his island in Tahiti (which he bought for $142,000 on March 13, 1967) was rustic. His primary concerns there were to preserve the natural beauty of the atoll and promote scientific research.18 Like many stars, however, he had a long list of dependents, relatives as well as friends, toward whom he could be extremely generous. What he cared about most was the freedom to spend money as he wished, which was enabled by late-twentieth-century filmmaking and his reputation.
Brando followed Superman with Alex Haley’s Roots: The Next Generations (1979), a television series he admired. In keeping with the trend of his roles over the decade, Brando played a villain: George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party. He was familiar with Rockwell, had read about him in his friend James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, bracketing a passage that drew parallels between Rockwell’s doctrines and those of the Nation of Islam suggesting that “the glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another—or others—always has been and always will be a recipe for murder.”19 Brando’s ten-minute cameo was awarded an Emmy for Best Supporting Actor (1979). His scene dramatized Haley’s
April 1976 Playboy interview with Rockwell, who was assassinated the following year. Dressed in a black storm-trooper’s uniform with red-and-white swastika armband, pipe in hand, Brando’s Rockwell is a sardonic figure who keeps a pistol on the desk before him, a precaution (like the hygienic aerosol he sprays, to offset contamination) required, he says matter-of-factly, by Haley’s race. Sporting a brown wig, looking plump but handsome, he blows smoke rings as he denies the Holocaust and excoriates the relativism of the “Jew anthropologist” Franz Boas. He refers fondly to the “hate-e-nannies” sponsored by his organization and provides samples of their lyrical bigotry. While he is no monster, despite his evil beliefs, he is a man without empathy. His weariness makes him terrifying—a far-too-believable human being.
APOCALYPSE NOW
Superman and Roots were relatively finite undertakings. Brando turned in reliable performances, but neither entailed the research and script revisions of a significant role. His next film, Apocalypse Now (1979), was different: an ambitious critique of the Vietnam War based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, it seemed to combine the commercial potential of Superman with the idealism of Roots. All evidence suggests that Brando took the role of Colonel Walter Kurtz seriously, despite negative publicity about his work.20 In the post-Watergate era, his skepticism about the war and politicians was widely shared. He had high hopes that he and Francis Ford Coppola could do something important with an issue central to American culture and its politics. Somewhere along the way, their relationship soured, primarily over the question of Brando’s contributions to the script and story. Brando told his side in a 1978 letter to Coppola: “When I came there, there was no story,” Brando writes, referring to his arrival on the Philippine set. “Whatever changes you made, whatever accommodations you made in that week the company was shut down [were] because you were convinced that what I said was true. . . . You spent a week there with me talking about the film, clarifying it in your own mind but also listening attentively to what I said and reading what I wrote. . . . It’s not really my job to be involved in the overall concept of the script. Most actors really don’t discuss that [but] I didn’t think at the time I could avoid discussing it.”21
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