The “horrible picture” Marlon Brando always regretted making: “I was miscast”
Even the greatest actors take some serious missteps once in a while. Sometimes it’s due to a bad script, sometimes it’s due to a lack of interesting offers, and sometimes it’s simply down to the corrupting influence of the prospect of lots and lots of money.
In the case of Marlon Brando, considered by many as the finest actor in human history, the misstep he regretted was at least very early on in his illustrious career.
Brando, of course, was the magnetic young actor who completely took over cinema in the early 1950s with string after string of hits containing some of the finest acting performances of all time, including his breakout role in A Streetcar Named Desire, the movie adaptation of the play by Tennessee Williams.
He was a genuine original; nobody had ever seen the kind of acting performances he was putting in, and he cemented it with more iconic films, including Viva Zapata! in 1952, Julius Caesar in 1953 and then most spectacularly, On the Waterfront the following year, which landed him his first Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’.
Those historic films showcased his mastery of method, blending a completely realistic showing with a cinematic presence onscreen that could enrapture men and women alike. He burned brightest during the 1950s, but struggled throughout the next decade in flops like Mutiny on the Bounty in 1962, which even struggled to recoup its budget. And it was during this decade that he developed a reputation for being difficult.
He had become famous and in-demand enough to insist on creative control, and this made him very unpopular with studios and directors at the time. But that all changed entirely in 1972, when Francis Ford Coppola cast him as Vito Corleone in the epic mafia tale The Godfather—the astonishing work that bagged him a second Oscar. Although quite famously, he wouldn’t accept it, sending a Native American activist in his place to protest Hollywood’s treatment of Indigenous people.
In that same year, he starred in the deeply controversial Last Tango in Paris, a very difficult watch with some outlandishly explicit scenes for the time that fell foul of the censors and ended up with an X rating. It showed the continued range Brando had at his disposal, though, because it was as far removed from his role in The Godfather as one could imagine.
Those missteps that we mentioned earlier, unfortunately, became more frequent after his final genuinely iconic role in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, and once the ‘90s had rolled around, the actor was taking on roles that weren’t befitting of his status, including bizarre sci-fi horror The Island of Dr Moreau in 1996.
But, according to Brando himself, the role he really regretted taking came some 45 years earlier, as he revealed in his autobiography: “In The Teahouse of the August Moon, I played an interpreter on Okinawa named Sakini, who spends most of the movie dueling with Glenn Ford, an American Army officer assigned to bring democracy and free enterprise to the island.”
He went on to highlight a previous performance of David Wayne as Sakini in the Broadway version, which he really admired, for it was “a delicate, amusing comedy of manners set against the backdrop of a stormy clash of cultures”.
However, regarding his turn, he noted, “As I’ve said, a well-written play is nearly actor-proof, but in Teahouse, Glenn Ford and I proved how easily actors can ruin a good play or movie when they’re so absorbed with themselves and their performances that they don’t act in concert. It was a horrible picture, and I was miscast.”
Teahouse was a 1956 comedy set during World War II, with a script adapted from a Tony Award-winning Broadway play. It has not aged well, to say the least, with several racial stereotypes particularly jarring in this day and age, especially. But it did fare better than Brando feared, becoming a hit with critics and audiences of the time.
To round off his career in 2001 just three years before his death, there was a reuniting with Godfather co-star Robert De Niro in a passable bank heist, The Score, and at least Brando was more picky with his later projects, saving him from some of the rather more embarrassing films that we’ve seen from the likes of Al Pacino, without mentioning any particular examples…OK, Jack and Jill with Adam Sandler.
