The sex farce that nearly ended Marlon Brando’s career: “I was ridiculous in that picture”
Marlon Brando was a very fortunate man. There is no question that he was one of the most talented actors of his generation, but he could easily have had a very different legacy if it hadn’t been for Francis Ford Coppola. Before The Godfather, he had been on a slow downhill trajectory that was threatening to be irreversible. If it had been, it’s easy to imagine the Brando narrative being about a wildly promising young actor who made a handful of era-defining films in the 1950s, only to slide into tragic obscurity.
Luckily, The Godfather became part two of his career and a cornerstone of his legacy. It came in the nick of time, only a handful of years after his lowest professional point. After all the wild acclaim of the 1950s, when films like A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront turned him into the most revered actor in Hollywood, Brando’s challenging behaviour on set and desire to pick movies outside the conventional studio system led to an unfavourable reputation.
In response, the actor entered what he would later call his ‘Fuck You Years’, when he took roles indiscriminately, paying no attention to the quality of the script, the director, or his co-stars. Was it better to seek out movies you thought would be hits only to see them sink at the box office or to take whatever came your way and not care how they turned out? Brando seemed to feel, in retrospect, that the former was probably better, but not before spending a decade and a half making trashy movies out of spite.
The lowest of lows came in 1968 when he signed on to a film called Candy. Directed by French actor Christian Marquand with a screenplay from the writer behind The Graduate, it was a sex farce that was meant to satirise the tropes of porn movies. It starred Ewa Aulin as the titular Candy, a high school student who finds herself in a series of unlikely predicaments that lead to sex and, more frequently, rape. A doctor, her uncle, and a military general are all part of the journey, but there are plenty of others. The movie was panned when it was released, but it has only gotten worse with age. It might have been intended as a comedic send-up of pornography, but it’s hard to see it as anything other than a creepy, often rapey male fantasy centred on a teenage girl.
Brando, who played a fake shaman, of course, was deeply embarrassed by the whole thing. He explained later that he did it as a favour to a friend who he didn’t want to turn down. Who that friend was and why they were so determined to ruin Brando’s career once and for all is unclear, but they very nearly succeeded. “I was ridiculous in that picture,” the actor lamented. “And everyone else in it was diminished by it.”
The word ‘everyone’ should not be glossed over here. Brando was no doubt referring to the rest of the cast, which was inexplicably included Richard Burton, James Coburn, John Huston, Walter Matthau, and Ringo Starr, who took the role of a Mexican gardener named Emmanuel. It was a low point for all of them.
