Marlon Brando Breaks

We know now what we could only have suspected: by the time Rolling Stone writer Chris Hodenfield and photographer Mary Ellen Mark cornered Marlon Brando on the Montana set of Arthur Penn’s Missouri Breaks it was basically over, not only for Brando as a beauty and a star but, largely, as an actor; not only for Brando in all those senses but also for the world he’d known, and made; over, perhaps even for us, before we’d even begun. 1976, the year of the film’s release and the Brando cover, marked an end to so many radical possibilities: the end of a wide-open era of American filmmaking, soon to be annulled by Spielberg and Lucas; the end of a species of genuine risk in performance, a species unknown to Brando’s smug and calculating Missouri Breaks costar, Jack Nicholson; the chance that the Democratic party could throw up anything but feeble moderation to the surging reactionary tide that has carried us to a present in which Brando’s beloved Black Panthers can only be recalled as quaint precursors to really important terrorism.

“He had this rule,” recalls Mary Ellen Mark today. “You had to ask him first: Mr. Brando, may I take your picture. I was there for ten days and of course I didn’t get anything. I said, so Marlon, I’m leaving, I don’t think I got anything. He said: Well, you can photograph me now. I did it all at the end. I got about four frames. Maybe ten exposures.” She adds: “That’s fine, I’m a purist. Less is more. He liked it, and asked me to work on Apocalypse Now.”

Brando looked chunky. Brando looked crazy. And when he given full voice by Hodenfield’s generous profile, Brando sounded paranoid, visionary, distracted, and alternately cynical and reverent about his craft, which he’d practiced not at all in the years since the polar-opposite triumphs of The Godfather and Last Tango In Paris. So this was a Marlon Brando come out of the wilderness, the world’s greatest actor condescending not only to be interviewed but to be sighted at large on planet Earth in the first place.

In Breaks Brando plays a mercurial Western serial killer, one using his role as a bounty hunter as an excuse for his nihilistic undermining of the frontier’s tenuous social fabric. He delivers with Shakespearean gusto, in a wild variety of accents, like Norman Mailer running for mayor. Yet Missouri Breaks is broken. The film is unable to sustain the performance and its meanings, leaning instead to convention: Jack Nicholson dispatches Monster Brando and gets the girl. The real showdown between the two occurs in the middle of the film, when Brando, unarmed and undressed, wreathed in a bubble bath and facing the point of Nicholson’s gun, utterly dominates the younger actor simply by turning his appallingly fleshy back and rolling his eyes to the ceiling, daring Nicholson’s character to shoot him in the back. Nicholson, understandably, quits the scene in disgust.

What’s shocking there is Brando’s complicity with the collapse of his masculine energies – and of all they imply for the viewer’s self-image. Nicholson’s reaction prefigures the audience’s revulsion at the remainder of Brando’s public career: revulsion for his gargantuan bulk and ugliness, the ruins of the prettiest man anyone had ever seen, and for his seeming failure to care about his art. Brando must have intuited how untenable he was as ‘a man of the people’, as an advocate for Native Americans or a surrogate for you and me. Instead he’d become a monster and a saint, beyond the human ken. All that remained was Apocalypse Now, one more ludicrous embodiment of an inhuman villainy, a signature on his accomplishment: in his villainous roles of the ’70’s Brando planted a tombstone on the grave of individualist American manhood, where lay the rebels and martyrs of The Wild One, The Fugitive Kind, and On the Waterfront. The Brando Mark caught gazing out on the 1976 cover is a hired killer, and like the killer in Missouri Breaks, he’d proven ready to destroy more than anyone had ever asked him to. Including Marlon Brando.

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Rolling Stone 2006