Werner Herzog’s favourite Marlon Brando performance: “An enormous, virile power”
Werner Herzog is a true original whose fans are ravenous for his peculiar combination of grandiosity, existentialism, impatience, and all-around badassery. He’s largely known for the films he made with actor Klaus Kinski in the 1970s and ‘80s, particularly Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and Fitzcorraldo. However, he has also made several Hollywood movies, including Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans with Nicolas Cage and Queen of the Desert with Nicole Kidman.
For a director with such an eclectic filmography, it might be surprising to learn that he reveres one of the most universally acclaimed actors of all time, but in true Herzog fashion, there’s a catch. When speaking to NPR in 2010 about the film classes he runs for his unconventional programme Rogue Film School, he revealed that he shows his students one of Marlon Brando’s films, but that it’s not the one the star is most known for.
Directed by Elia Kazan, 1952’s Viva Zapata! is a loose biopic of the early 20th-century revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and was scripted by none other than novelist John Steinbeck. As the titular leader, Brando gives his best performance of all time, according to Herzog.
“An enormous, virile power is lurking,” the director explained. “He talks very, very quietly, [but] you know this is going to be big… something which only occurs in myth, which only occurs in collective dreams, but completely convincingly. That’s where cinema is at its best — when it is able to transform history into something mythical.”
It’s easy to see why this type of performance would appeal to Herzog. Many of his films focus on larger-than-life figures who stake their reputations and lives on a grand act of nonconformity – the more irrational, the better. He specifically singled out one scene in Viva Zapata, the opening, in which the president dismisses a crowd of peasants surrounding his desk only to find one man (Brando) standing calmly, refusing to leave before he says what he’s come to say (albeit extremely quietly).
It was Brando’s first performance after his breakout role in A Streetcar Named Desire, and critics could not get enough of him. He had yet to make his decisive mark on cinema with On the Waterfront, but he was showing Hollywood what his brand of acting could do to shake up the stuffy film industry that was still pouring money into Technicolor musicals.
He had even gone to Mexico to pick up the accent and the movement that he used for the role, and received his second Best Actor Oscar nomination for his efforts. Ultimately, however, it was Anthony Quinn who was recognised for the film, winning Best Supporting Actor for his role as Zapata’s brother and becoming the first Mexican-born actor to win an Academy Award.
These days, Viva Zapata! is rarely remembered as one of Brando’s or Kazan’s greatest movies, partly because even Brando couldn’t compensate for the fact that he was a white actor playing a Mexican role. But as Herzog contends, it does contain one of the star’s most quietly powerful performances and demonstrates how a movie star of his magnitude can turn a run-of-the-mill biopic into a riveting piece of cinema.
