How “sex and violence” turned Marlon Brando’s 1971 horror movie into a hit: “It’s as simple as that”
There was a time when Marlon Brando was the ultimate Hollywood star, representing a new vision of masculinity in the post-war era, defined by a working-class charm and raw sexuality that contrasted many of the well-to-do actors of the period.
Brando brought this visceral animalism, mixing emotional vulnerability with a rugged sense of toughness, to many of his roles, subsequently dominating the 1950s with turns in the likes of A Streetcar Named Desire, The Wild One, and On the Waterfront.
However, despite finding success, and even an Oscar, the next decade proved to be much less fruitful, with one of Brando’s worst roles coming in when he starred in the film Candy, a questionable sex comedy that saw him play an Indian guru who teaches the naive heroine the stages of enlightenment in an attempt to bed her (apparently Brando actually tried to sleep with 17-year-old Ewa Aulin during the filming of their scene).
It was a low point in his career, which represented a period of critical decline. His once-revolutionary approach to method acting was now overruled by laziness and bad choices, but as the 1970s rolled around, the actor knew he needed to turn things around, and shortly before he found his career-defining role as Vito Corleone in The Godfather, he found success with Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn! and, more interestingly for Brando, a horror movie called The Nightcomers.
Horror is not a genre you typically associate with Brando, but The Nightcomers director Michael Winner has an idea that it was only the “sex and violence” of the picture that actually made it successful. Regardless of the real reason, it was the hit that Brando needed to get his career back into a stable position.
Winner told The New York Times, “Pictures I’ve made with sex and violence have done very well; pictures I’ve made without them have done rather poorly. It’s as simple as that. Even when we did The Nightcomers, with Brando, which won a few festivals, it was only the sex and violence that made it profitable.”
The movie, which served as a prequel interpretation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, wasn’t a huge box-office hit, but it performed well enough to turn a profit. It wasn’t exactly critically acclaimed either, but it earned Brando a Bafta nomination regardless, suggesting that perhaps the actor was reclaiming his place in the industry.
So, Brando would find moderate success with his first horror movie, a rather unexpected genre to find the actor in, and it’s not something he’d frequently return to, apart from when he took on the role of a mad scientist in The Island of Dr Moreau, a bizarre disaster of a movie that ended up being a failure on all accounts.
Brando might’ve been a versatile and groundbreaking star, but a horror icon he was not. At least he got lucky with the amount of “sex and violence” in The Nightcomers, which allowed his first ever foray into the genre to become somewhat of a success.
