‘Bedtime Story’: The only movie Marlon Brando was genuinely excited to make
Marlon Brando has gone down in history as one of the greatest actors of all time, but no one would ever accuse him of being easy to work with. Throughout his six-decade career, he wreaked havoc on an untold number of film sets, showing up late, unprepared, disengaged, or too eccentric for comfort. A lot of this had to do with the way he approached acting. It wasn’t just his profession or the bulk of his identity – he internalised his characters on a cellular level and took acting deadly seriously. It’s no wonder things got out of hand sometimes.
His career went through several distinct stages. In the early 1950s, he was the man of the moment, a young star unlike anything Hollywood had ever seen. His characters were brooding, complex, and vulnerable, a far cry from the Jimmy Stewarts and Cary Grants of the world. His acting was naturalistic, as moving and believable as real life. He earned four Oscar nominations in four years during this period and won for On the Waterfront.
By the end of the ’50s, he started embracing his political identity and seeking more socially conscious stories. The Teahouse of the August Moon and Sayonara are both credited with helping to destigmatise interracial marriage, even though the former features Brando appearing in yellowface. By the early ‘60s, however, he was in a very negative frame of mind about his career and the industry. He’d had a string of flops, and his unwieldy behaviour on film sets was tainting his reputation.
So, he put his career on autopilot, signing a multi-year contract with a studio to relinquish all creative decision-making. For the most part, this part of his filmography was an infamous waste of his talents. The Ugly American, The Appaloosa, A Countess from Hong Kong, and The Night of the Following Day flopped at the box office and sent his career into the doldrums. However, there was one unexpected bright spot. Bedtime Story, which was released in 1964 between The Ugly American and The Appaloosa, turned out to be the most enjoyable working experience of his life.
Directed by Ralph Levy, it followed two con artists, played by Brando and David Niven, who compete to seduce wealthy women on the French Riviera. If you’ve seen Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, you’ll recognise the plot. In this case, Brando was in the Steve Martin role, and Niven was in the Michael Caine role. The On the Waterfront star loved every minute of the filming process, thanks in large part to his complete adoration of his co-star.
Niven was a beloved figure in Hollywood, an Englishman with a cut-glass accent and impeccable sense of wit and style. He tended to charm everyone he came in contact with, whether it was his old friend Humphrey Bogart or Princess Margaret. “Working with David was the only time I ever looked forward to filming,” Brando said many years later. “I just couldn’t wait to wake up each morning and go to work so he could make me laugh.”
It’s a wholesome image – Brando, the greatest actor of his generation, cracking up on set with Niven. The film, like most of the others he made in the early and mid-60s, fared poorly at the box office, but it should have done much better. It’s full of charm, and although it might have seemed old-fashioned and a little slight, even by the standards of 1964, it contains one of Brando’s most disarming and underrated performances.
