A good movie

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but, since I have always been a big fan of Marlon Brando, I was quite eager to check it out. At the end of the 50’s, Stanley Kubrick just had his breakthrough with ‘Path of Glory’ and he was supposed to make this movie with Brando which, on paper, did sound pretty awesome. However, Kubrick was fired or did quit at the beginning of the production so we will never know how this movie could have been with these 2 giants involved. Eventually, Brando took over the directing duties and it would be his only directing credit. To be honest, it is not surprising that he would never direct again because directing demands such a huge investment in time, energy, responsibility,… while, as an actor, he didn’t even learn his lines and very often worked only to get a big paycheck. But how was the damned thing after all? Well, it was actually not bad at all. Indeed, even if it was nothing really original or ground-breaking, it was still a solid vintage Western. Above all, back then, Brando was such a charismatic actor, he was just quite spellbinding to behold, even if this movie which was a big flop would be the start of the worst decade in his career (you could also argue that, even though he was active for 50 years, beside the 50’s and the 70’s, pretty much everything else he did was rather underwhelming). Karl Malden was also pretty good here and the scenes involving the two men going through a whole range of emotions were really neat. Eventually, the only issue was that, with a running time of almost 150 mins, it was just too long. In fact, Brando’s first cut was almost 5 hrs long which would have been pretty much unwatchable but, at that point, he was already so fed up with working on this project and the studio took over the editing process. As a result, you can imagine that Brando originally wanted to go even deeper in exploring the complexities of the characters involved. At least, you might hope so. Anyway, to conclude, it turned out to be a decent watch and I think it is worth a look, especially if you are interested in Marlon Brando’s work. 

7/10