“This is visually stunning, what he did”: the movie Martin Scorsese called a western like no other
Growing up in the 1940s and exposed to the magic of cinema for the first time at a very early age, Martin Scorsese was inevitably raised on a steady diet of westerns, largely because the genre was the most dominant form of big-screen Hollywood entertainment during his filmic upbringing.
Of course, Scorsese has become eminently familiar with all forms of celluloid from every corner of the globe dating right back to the advent of the moving image, so when he speaks in such reverential tones about a particular picture, it carries an added amount of weight because he’s seen more movies than most.
However, one of them earned special praise for being a massively ambitious project. Not only was it the directorial debut of a world-renowned actor, but it was also a story that had passed through the hands of Sam Peckinpah and Stanley Kubrick, two of the very best and most distinctive auteurs of their era.
Beyond that, it wasn’t even the debut of an aspiring filmmaker but a generational on-camera talent who only ended up sitting in the director’s chair because they instigated Peckinpah’s firing and opted to take the reins themself. The film was 1961’s One-Eyed Jacks, and the rookie wielding the megaphone was Marlon Brando.
Brando had already signed on as the leading man, playing outlaw Rio, who pulls a bank job in Mexico before making a hasty getaway with Karl Malden’s accomplice, Dad. After being betrayed by his partner, Rio spends years concocting a plot for revenge that he puts into action, which hits several roadblocks when he discovers that Dad is now a California sheriff with a stepdaughter Rio quickly falls for.
It may have flopped at the box office, but One-Eyed Jacks made such an impression on Scorsese that he oversaw a restoration through his film foundation. Brando was such a singular talent as an actor that there was no chance his directorial bow would be anything other than fascinating, but what impressed the icon the most was how it deftly straddled the best of both worlds.
Presenting a screening at the 2016 edition of the New York Film Festival, Scorsese marvelled at a film he viewed as being “unlike any other western around.” He was captivated by how Brando had marshalled the broadest strokes of the conventional western but married it with the more introspective and progressive values that would define ‘New Hollywood’, a term that hadn’t even been coined yet.
“It’s visually stunning, what he did,” Scorsese remarked of Brando’s assured arrival as a filmmaker. “The intensity and the energy of the actors just burst out the edges of the screen. It was kind of a cross between the old style of production and the new styles that were going to come in the ’60s. The essence of it is of the old Hollywood, in a way.”
Scorsese was blown away by the promise and effortlessness of Brando’s unexpected and unplanned segue into directing, but One-Eyed Jacks would forever remain the only time he ever took that plunge.
