“The best”: The 1969 performance Marlon Brando wanted to be remembered for
Amid a modern era of weedy onscreen brats, Marlon Brando couldn’t look more like the archetype actor if he tried.
Brimming with swagger, macho energy, and the faint whiff of a Hollywood scandal somewhere around the corner, the Godfather actor epitomised stardom in the most artful manner. As Jack Nicholson proudly put it when proclaiming Brando as the most important star of recent times, “We are all Brando’s children.”
While some reports might file him as the forefather of modern method acting, he was also known to rock up to set without having read the script. At least that was the case when it came to Apocalypse Now, and that just so happened to be perhaps his finest performance. Beyond that. It may well be the best film he starred in to boot.
So, it just goes to show that Brando had natural talent. Yet, there’s one film where he feels like his inherent skill and eager effort collided to create his best picture and his best performance. It might not be his most famed outing, but Brando would urge you to watch 1969’s Burn.
In his memoir, Songs My Mother Taught Me, he singled the movie out as “the best acting I’ve ever done”. If you ask the likes of Nicholson, they’d likely opine that that makes it pretty much the best acting anyone has ever done, period.
Speaking about the film, Brando commented, “Aside from Elia Kazan and Bernardo Bertolucci, the best director I worked with was Gillo Pontecorvo, even though we nearly killed each other. He directed me in a 1968(9) film that practically no one saw.”
Indeed, it wasn’t a box office hit, but that was largely due to the ‘indie’ stylings of the picture and its original foreign title, but as Brando continues, it was certainly not short of entertainment. “I played an English spy, Sir William Walker, who symbolized all the evils perpetrated by the European powers on their colonies during the nineteenth century,” he said.
This provided a pertinent commentary on American foreign policy at the time. “There were a lot of parallels to Vietnam,” Brando added, “and the movie portrayed the universal theme of the strong exploiting the weak. I think I did the best acting I’ve ever done in that picture, but few people came to see it.”
It wasn’t an easy motion picture to put together. It was mostly filmed in the Colombian tropics, and Brando recalls, “Most days the temperature was over 103 degrees, and the humidity made the set a Turkish bath.”
But if anything, that only further highlights the crew’s battle to commit something important to the screen. Over half a century later, it mightn’t be Brando’s most-watched movie, but he’s not being self-indulgent when he singles it out: Burn is a captivating and gutsy descent into darkness.
In many ways, that premise alone makes it made for Brando to be remembered for. He captured the heart and viscera of humanity better than anyone.
