The movie Marlon Brando was forced to make after going on the run and being apprehended by the government
There will only ever be one Marlon Brando, a statement that rings true about his transformative approach to acting and the wayward antics that defined his off-camera life.
For many people, including several all-time greats themselves, he’s the best ever. For others, he was an unruly and unprofessional nightmare who sabotaged countless productions through his own self-indulgent and disruptive behaviour. In some cases, he was both at the same time.
The older Brando got, the more selective he became over the roles he wanted to play. Between his screen debut in 1950 and the 1972 release of Last Tango in Paris, 1959 and 1970 were the only years he didn’t appear in at least one feature. After that, there was only one more occasion until his death that he was credited in a film for three consecutive years.
It’s part of Brando’s legend that he gradually fell out of love with acting, but even when he was at the beginning of a career that reshaped the entire profession for generations to come, he could be a difficult customer. Of course, it’s hard to drag a decent performance out of somebody who didn’t want to be on set in the first place, but the circumstances behind Désirée, which was released less than four months after On the Waterfront, were especially bizarre.
The actor was supposed to headline the historical epic The Egyptian, which Darryl F Zanuck was producing. Brando was poised to co-star alongside Bella Darvi in the picture, who happened to be the alleged mistress of the ‘Golden Age’ mogul. He got cold feet and decided he didn’t want to make the movie, so he decided the smartest thing to do was to try and disappear off the face of the earth.
According to Stefan Kanfer’s Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando, he went into hiding and became what was essentially a Hollywood fugitive. Brando would move from hotel to hotel and stay with friends so that Zanuck wouldn’t know where he was, but when he stopped off at his own home to grab some belongings, he was apprehended by US Marshals, who may or may not have been hired by the producer to keep watch on his abode to snatch him if and when he showed up.
Zanuck threatened to sue him for backing out of The Egyptian, but a compromise was reached: Brando would instead headline the Napoleon Bonaparte biopic. He didn’t want to, and he couldn’t have cared less about behaving himself or giving a half-decent performance, but he would be slapped with litigation if he didn’t.
Brando didn’t grin and bear it, though. Instead, he spent the majority of the shoot belittling director Henry Kosta, intentionally forgetting his lines in the middle of takes, switching up his accent from scene to scene to disrupt the schedule, and even reportedly spraying the film’s extras with a fire hose for his own amusement.
There was a way to voice his dissatisfaction and apprehension over The Egyptian, but it should go without saying that pulling a disappearing act and being collared by the federal authorities before being forced into an entirely different movie wasn’t the best way to go about it.
