‘Missouri Breaks’: The lesser-known movie featuring Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando
You’d think that if Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando were in a movie together, everyone would know about it. But they were, and remarkably, most people don’t.
When the acting duo worked together in 1976, Nicholson was at the peak of his career, having earned his third Oscar nomination the year before for Chinatown and won his first statuette for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest just months before.
Brando, on the other hand, was enjoying a career resurgence between winning an Oscar for Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather and appearing in Apocalypse Now.
When they joined forces for Missouri Breaks, they had everything going for them, including one of the era’s greatest directors, Arthur Penn, who had helmed Bonnie and Clyde. In the film, Nicholson plays cattle thief Tom Logan, who plots against a wealthy landowner for killing his friend. Brando plays Robert E Lee Clayton, a contract killer who the landowner hires to take care of Logan and his gang.
It’s a promising set-up for a western, but Brando was on his own plane of existence. Though that was always to be expected, he was in particularly eccentric form for this performance. For part of the film, he speaks with an Irish accent. For the rest, he favours a posh English one. He also decided to dress like a provincial grandmother, bonnet and dress included.
Critics eviscerated the performance for being hilariously self-indulgent, even for Brando.
What was Marlon Brando’s first movie?
Most people think of Stanley Kowalski as Brando’s first role. Having established the character in the Broadway run of A Streetcar Named Desire, he caught the attention of Hollywood and never let go. However, before making the 1951 movie version of the play, which earned him his first Oscar nomination, Brando appeared in Fred Zinnemann’s 1950 drama The Men.
In the film, the actor plays Ken Wilocek, a paralysed veteran learning to adjust to his new reality. The performance might not be as famous as the one he played the following year, but it earned raves from critics. To prepare for the role, Brando spent a month at an army hospital, and some of the patients there ended up with roles in the movie.
Although Brando’s later work has largely eclipsed the film, it stands out as a surprisingly modern effort for its era, and is more in keeping with the movies that were released during and after the Vietnam War than the ones made about World War II.
…and how old was Marlon Brando in ‘The Godfather’?
Brando became a star in his mid-20s as soon as audiences saw him play the tortured husband of Blanche Dubois in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire, but his most famous role wouldn’t arrive for another two decades. The actor spent the 1950s at the top of his game, the 1960s floundering through bad movies and worse press coverage about his behaviour, and the 1970s clawing his way back to the top of the heap.
The Godfather marked his return to acclaim, and although he played an ageing patriarch, he was far from it. At the time when the film was released in 1972, he was still in his forties, only 16 years older than Al Pacino, who plays his youngest son in the movie. When he screen-tested for the part, Brando arrived with cotton balls in his mouth, a simple trick that made him almost unrecognisable and allowed him to disappear into the character.
By dropping his voice to a raspy whisper, he also managed to sound much older than his 48 years, cementing his place in the iconography of cinema like never before.
