Favorite Movies w/ Marlon Brando?

There are some great numbers in it - sung by others...

 

Yes - and yes, but I like Brando in this.

 

Superman!

 

One that I enjoy hasn't been mentioned yet - The Missouri Breaks

Quirky 1976 western with Jack Nicholson. I like it when Brando obviously has fun with a role.

Edit: I see it was mentioned in passing, above.

 

On The Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire.

After those, Guys and Dolls, The Wild One and The Godfather.

 

The Godfather
Mutiny On The Bounty
Apocalypse Now
A Streetcar Named Desire

 

Waterfront is my 2d favorite all time movie, only behind the Third Man. Yeah "that scene" is great, but I love the scene where he takes Eva Marie Saint for a beer. He's brilliant all throughout that film, aside from the bad makeup / fake blood at the end.

 

That was my favorite movie as a high school senior. I heard about it, and after watching "The Godfather", I went to the mall to get it, and totaled my mom's car in the process. But when I finally got home, I watched "On The Waterfront" twice, back-to-back, something I've never done ever since or before that.

I love many of the memorable scenes, but I also love when they are outside, she drops her glove, and he picks it up, but instead of giving it to her, he wears it himself.

 

That’s a great scene. Or the scene where Malden convinced Brando to come clean to Eva, and you see the conversation from afar with the boat noise covering the dialogue. Hell nowadays it’s just novel to see a priest in a movie or tv who is just a good priest.

 

Yes, how you can't hear her scream.. Her eyes scared me, too! LOL @ good priest - let em smoke cigarettes, just don't break the law!

 

I saw "The Formula" in the theater when it came out in 1980 and I remember practically nothing about it now, except I seem to recall that Brando's role was rather small and he and Scott didn't have a scene together until fairly late into the film.

 

I always enjoyed "Julius Caesar". Great cast - Brando, Louis Calhern, John Gielgud, James Mason, Greer Garson, Deborah Kerr - I try to watch it whenever it is shown on TCM.

 

Well, isn't it his last role?

 

I could have sworn there was one after this, Free Money. But I looked it up and that was a few years before. So you are correct, The Score was his last performance.

 

I wonder if Brando learned any lines at all for the Michael Jackson video You Rock My World. He says very little, and the little he does say doesn't fit with the story.

Like, a henchman tells him "there's fighting downstairs", and Brando replies, "now?". Of course it's happening "now", if "there's fighting downstairs".

 

Doesn't Brando take a long look at Mike and smirk, "You think you're pretty cute, eh?"

I like just about every lead performance Brando made in movies. A few very good ones that I especially like are:

Mutiny on the Bounty (1962, Milestone)
As Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, Brando is a genteel, cheeky, playboy Brit who turns serious once faced with the exploits of Trevor Howard's tyrannical Captain Bly. A long one, it's a remake of the Clark Gable/Charles Laughton 1935 film, but the acting and production are very good.

Last Tango In Paris (1972, Bertolucci)
Brando plays a recent widower who tries to bury his pain by engaging in a debauched sexual affair with an underage model. A difficult role that Brando pulls off with alternating subtlety and rage.

The Young Lions (1958, Dmytryk)
As Lieutenant Christian Diestl, Brando is an earnest former ski instructor (oddly, not a rascal in this one) who believes in the altruistic intentions of Hitler for Germany. But his is one very good performance among several in this fine ensemble piece about a group of friends in the European theater in the Second World War. Overlooked performance worth seeing and a good film.

Viva Zapata (1952, Kazan)
Well, I'm watching it tonight. For years I've heard mostly favorable reviews. Brando plays Mexican revolutionary, Emiliano Zapata, who fought on behalf of peasants against corrupt militias and military leaders at the turn of the 20th century. Anthony Quinn, as Emiliano's brother, Eufemio, got an Oscar for his performance. Looking forward to it.

 

I”ve not seen all his films by any means, but Brando always gave an interesting performance, regardless of whether the film was any good or not.

I think his early film performances were his best, when he was still keen and hadn’t yet learned to ‘despise’ acting as a craft. On The Waterfront is hard to beat: I first saw it when I was 16, after learning that it was one of Bob Dylan’s favourite films. But Brando is just one of many great things about that film: the only thing that hasn’t worn well is the somewhat pious tone adopted by Kazan and Schulberg.

I’ll put my tin hat on, but I think he was miscast in Streetcar......(yes, I know he had TW’s approval and created the role on stage). He looked too beautiful (like a Greek god) for the animalistic Kowalski, plus he doesn’t sound like he’s from the south.

His performance as an Okinawan in Teahouse of the August Moon was highly acclaimed back in the day, but no-one seems to talk about it now...

I’m probably alone in this, too, but I think he looks a bit mannered in The Godfather, though the performance is full of great touches. The rest of the cast seem to have superseded him in the naturalism stakes.

I feel uncomfortable watching him in Last Tango in Paris, and not just because of what later came to light about the making of that film. I have to ask myself: is this acting, or is it psychotherapy?

He was (I think unfairly) accused of laziness in his later years, when he wouldn’t/couldn’t learn a script and insisted on the relevant bits being pasted where he could read them off-camera. I think he was aiming for a kind of ‘spontaneous naturalism’ (‘how do I know what I’m going to say until I say it?’) which has eluded other actors.

One interesting example of a ‘bad’ Brando performance is the little-known film Night Of The Following Day. Brando over-acts in this one, but I’m more inclined to blame the director (for whom Brando had zero respect) for making bad choices: though maybe he only had bad options to choose from?

 

Ha - if the film's any good should you be asking either question?

You must have really had trouble with his turn in Apocalypse Now if Tango made you squirm. Or did his characterization as a psychopath give him an out?

You've got a point about the lack of seriousness in his later work. May have started with The Fugitive Kind where he was reportedly the first actor to be paid a million dollars for a role (again, for which he as miscast. Always felt it called for a Southern Chet Baker type).

For good and/or bad Brando set a kind of mold for what a classic American male actor aspired to be for generations in the 20th century.

 

I’ve only seen him in a few. I liked him in Missouri Breaks and, of course, Apocalypse Now. He was also great in The Godfather.

 

I had posted this in the “what book are you reading” thread. It’s a fascinating account of a convoluted filmmaking story. Worth the read. So, that film (which he put his heart and soul into), “Mutiny on the Bounty” (I know, it was a very difficult shoot, but it was an Event when I was a teen. Still love it.), “On the Waterfront”, and “Last Tango” (his soliloquy over his lost love is absolutely amazing).

 

One Eyed Jacks
Apocalypse Now
The Godfather
Mutiny On the Bounty
On the Waterfront
Streetcar
Morituri

He's been my favorite actor since I saw him in early '60s in Mutiny. I wrote him a letter the next day asking for an autographed pic. Never got it. I was 8.

 

One of my all-time favorite Marlon Brando performances was in The Freshman - which is essentially Brando's Never Say Never Again. It's one more chance, no matter how ludicrous, to play his most famous character one more time...

And he kills it. Brando is funny - but he's self consciously funny, poking as much fun at himself as he does Don Corleone (In the car with Matthew Broderick "I'm really very concerned about this ozone business."). He's also unexpectedly sweet - there's a beautiful moment where Brando simply smiles watching Broderick's Clark dance with his daughter Tina. Oh - and who knew the then-very-stately Mr. Brando could ice skate with such grace?

...and yeah, The Godfather, of course. He casts such a long shadow over the movie I'm often surprised how little he's actually in it.

Superman: The Movie. Sells every last line he's given (or reading off a cue card) especially in the Fortress of Solitude, explaining why he sent Kal-El to Earth ("They're a good people, they wish to be...they only lack the light to show the way." - gets me every time).

Last Tango In Paris. A brave performance in a very brave movie. Brando could have done anything after The Godfather...and made this.

 

I forgot about The Freshman ! That was good even if he was just rehashing Vito Corleone.

 

He is actually the best thing about Superman, which was (of course) the first Brando performance I can remember seeing.

There was much kerfuffle at the time about the vast (in those days) paycheque he was getting for what was basically a day’s work. I’m sure they could’ve got an almost as renowned (and cheaper, plus more reliable) actor to fill that role but Brando’s casting was there to lend prestige to a ‘comic book film’. And he plays the character with exactly the required weight.

 

The studio butchery of OEJ reportedly broke his heart. I think that was when his hatred of ‘the industry’ began. Though, really, he ought to have known what would happen: if studio bosses could hack a masterpiece by Erich von Stroheim (Greed) to pieces, they could do the same to a film directed by an actor turned first time director.