The “dismal” movie Marlon Brando was tricked into making: “I had been snookered”
After it became increasingly clear that Marlon Brando had fallen out of love with acting, the most difficult thing about getting him to appear in a movie was convincing him that making it was worth his time.
Having burst onto the scene in the mid-1950s and changed the profession forever, inspiring every subsequent generation of thespians in the process, his career became a succession of highs and lows. By the end of the 1960s, he was teetering on the brink of irrelevance, only for The Godfather to send him soaring back into the spotlight.
It was a short-lived renaissance, though, with Brando once again becoming so apathetic towards cinema that he took a nine-year sabbatical after 1980’s The Formula and would only appear onscreen sporadically until his death in 2004, with his Academy Award-nominated turn in A Dry White Season the only real performance of note between those two points.
Brando’s legacy as arguably the greatest of all time has become so intertwined with his reputation as a lazy, difficult, and impetuous personality that it’s easy to forget how prolific he was at the start. Following his feature debut in 1950’s The Men, he made another 11 films in the next ten years, notching five Oscar nods and one win between 1952 and 1958 to cement himself as an industry-shaking talent.
They weren’t all winners, at least as far as Brando was concerned. His third big-screen outing, Viva Zapata!, reunited him with his A Streetcar Named Desire director Elia Kazan, who’d also helm On the Waterfront and always be remembered by the iconic method man as his favourite filmmaker to work with.
On paper, there was nothing wrong with the picture or Brando’s Oscar-nominated leading role. However, the presence of one of the industry’s most powerful producers quickly came back to haunt him. “Unbeknownst to me, I had been snookered into making a two-picture deal with Darryl Zanuck that would include Viva Zapata! and one other,” he wrote in his memoir, Songs My Mother Taught Me.
“In those days, I never read a contract,” Brando explained. “I remember that my agent and friend Jay Kantor chased me for quite a while to get me to renew the agency contract. He finally cornered me and told me he was going to lose his job if I didn’t sign it.” Seeking to do a favour for a friend, the actor obliviously inked a deal for two movies without even realising.
Zanuck had tried to leverage Brando into headlining 1954’s historical epic The Egyptian, but he quit a week before the start of shooting. Unfortunately, the studio mogul still had the star bent over a barrel, exercising his contractual option to cast him as Napoleon Bonaparte in Desirée, a project Brando wasn’t convinced would succeed.
“It was half a victory,” he recalled of fulfilling his two-film obligation by headlining a film he didn’t care about. “By my lights, Desirée was superficial and dismal, and I was astonished when told that it had been a success.” It was a box office hit in spite of tepid reviews, but Brando would have avoided the indignity of being forced into making the movie if he’d bothered to read his contract with Zanuck before signing it.
