The movie Marlon Brando said made as much sense “as a rat fucking a grapefruit”
The overriding irony of Marlon Brando was that he grew to loathe acting, despite spending more than half of his professional life being repeatedly called the greatest of all time.
He wasn’t always so apathetic toward his chosen vocation, though, but once he fell out of love with his craft, he fell out with it big time. From the 1970s on, there was barely a performance he gave or production he appeared in that didn’t come burdened with at least one tale of woe.
Like most people, Brando enjoyed being paid handsomely for his efforts, which is about the only reason he didn’t retire. He tried to, several times, and threatened to do so several times more, but the lure of a multi-million-dollar paycheque for doing the bare minimum for as little time as possible proved strangely alluring.
Then again, it wasn’t as if he suddenly woke up one day and decided he fucking hated being a thespian. It was a slow, gradual process, which was partly his fault for making so many movies he came to regret. Even before he entered permanent autopilot, he had no issues decrying his own pictures, with 1969’s The Night of the Following Day a prominent example.
Arriving at the tail end of a whirlwind decade, which began with One-Eyed Jacks and Mutiny on the Bounty and continued into A Countess from Hong Kong, Reflections in a Golden Eye, and Candy, Brando played a chauffeur named Bud in director Hubert Cornfield’s crime flick, which sounded straightforward on paper.
Alongside Richard Boone’s Leer and Rita Moreno’s Vi, the trio kidnap a French heiress and hold her for ransom. However, the trio gradually begins to turn on one another as paranoia and self-preservation kick in, and Brando evidently wasn’t thrilled with how the narrative progressed, considering that he described The Night of the Following Day as making “as much sense as a rat fucking a grapefruit.”
That’s certainly a highly specific and somewhat unsavoury mental image, but if that’s how he wanted to surmise the experience, then fair fucks. After all, he was Marlon Brando; eccentricity was kind of his thing. Another thing he abhorred was the director, so he essentially forced Cornfield out of a job.
At the star’s insistence, even though he didn’t really want to, Boone was elevated to the director’s chair, even though his filmmaking experience extending only to directing himself in episodes of Have Gun, Will Travel and The Richard Boone Show. Still, since Brando wouldn’t accept Cornfield as a figure of authority that he couldn’t trust and didn’t want to work with, he didn’t really have a choice.
In the end, The Night of the Following Day was merely another curio in the icons ’60s canon, which was quickly swept under the rug when Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn! was released nine months later in 1969, which Brando fondly remembered as the best acting he’d ever done.
