Over four million people paid for Marlon Brando’s final performance, but hardly anyone saw it
He’ll always be remembered as one of cinema’s greatest-ever actors, and if he’s not the best of all time, he’s definitely the most influential, but Marlon Brando ended his career on a sad note.
The last feature film he ever appeared in was Frank Oz’s 2001 crime caper, The Score, which is best remembered for two things: teaming the legendary star with Robert De Niro for the first and only time, and his complete derision for the director, who he eventually refused to be directed by.
Brando had several irons in the fire in the years that followed, but none of them came to fruition. There were his bizarre acting lessons, where some of the industry’s great and good gathered in their numbers to sit under the learning tree of an eccentric master, but despite hatching the plan to release the class on DVD to make some much-needed money, they’ve never been released.
He was supposed to shoot a cameo in the opening scene of Scary Movie 2, and the lasting legacy of his abandoned contribution is Natasha Lyonne owning the footage of Brando holding her boob. There was also Big Bug Man, the animated feature where he voiced an old woman, as was his wont, but that wasn’t released, either.
However, the most successful late-stage Brando performances came burdened with a major asterisk. For one thing, he was barely in it, despite his involvement being highly publicised, and his sole contribution that remained intact was only discovered by accident or by people who hunted far and wide to find it.
Francis Ford Coppola may have loathed its very existence, but 2006’s video game, The Godfather, shifted over four million copies. James Caan and Robert Duvall reprised their roles, and Brando was supposed to do the same, before the team behind the game realised that he was in no fit condition to do so.
“We didn’t have much time with Brando before he died,” sound designer Ken Felton told The New York Times. “But he really gave us a lot of insight into the mind of the don, into the essence of his character. And in trying to understand the don, in trying to understand The Godfather universe, it really does all come down to the concept of respect.”
The production crew spent an afternoon at Brando’s home to record his lines, but “because there were oxygen tubes in his nose,” they were deemed unusable. Instead, Doug Abrahams voiced Vito Corleone for the majority of the game, with one exception, but it wasn’t easy to find. For those who did, they got to hear Brando’s last-ever performance.
“You know, it’s a lot of foolishness about this Solozzo business,” he said. “It’s so unfortunate, really unnecessary. Give him my ‘no’ with common courtesy. I told him his business would not interfere with mine. And he wouldn’t take it right. I know the Tattaglia family has brought misfortune down on our own heads. Well, that’s life. Everybody’s got their own tale of sorrow.”
To hear the two-time Academy Award winner’s final lines, players had to ignore in-game instructions to kill Tattaglia’s henchmen in the lower floors of a hospital, head to Corleone’s room instead, and listen to Michael assure his father that everything will be alright following an assassination attempt that left him at death’s door.
It’s a hard listen, with Brando clearly struggling to deliver even a couple of lines of dialogue, which might be why it was hidden as an Easter Egg, which still doesn’t seem like a fitting way for a talent of his magnitude to bid farewell to performing.
