One-Eyed Jacks: Marlon Brando’s Classic Restored

By Erin Free & Steve Saragossi

It’s enticing to play “what if” and conjure up imaginary star or director projects, but few could be more tantalising than the prospect of Stanley Kubrick directing a western. In 1961, it very nearly came to pass. In 1956, Rod (The Twilight Zone) Serling wrote an adaptation of the novel, The Authentic Death Of Hendry Jones, which was a thinly veiled interpretation of the life of western outlaw, Billy The Kid. The attached producer rejected the script and turned it over to Sam Peckinpah for a rewrite.

This aroused the interest of actor Marlon Brando, who then secured the rights to make the film. His company hired director, Stanley Kubrick, on the strength of his previous films, The Killing and Paths Of Glory, the latter of which Brando very much admired. Brando’s friend and co-star from On The Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire, Karl Malden, was tapped for the juicy role of the film’s villain – bank robbing crook come crooked sheriff, Dad Longworth – with Brando taking on the role of the younger outlaw, Rio, who he so viciously double crosses, leading to an expansive tale of revenge. The film would, of course, eventually be retitled One-Eyed Jacks.

Marlon Brando, now relishing the role of movie mogul, promptly rejected Sam Peckinpah’s rewrite of the script on spurious grounds, and fired him, replacing him with Paths Of Glory screenwriter, Calder Willingham. Willingham, however, was extremely slow in delivering a shooting script, so Brando brought in Guy Trosper, who had penned the Elvis Presley vehicle, Jailhouse Rock. “He and I constantly improvised and rewrote between shots and setups, often hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute,” Brando reflected in his autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me. These delays caused the meticulous Stanley Kubrick to become highly agitated, which, when set against Brando’s increasingly dictatorial behaviour, created a powder keg atmosphere on set.

With no finished script in sight, Kubrick, although keen to direct the film, became ever more paranoid and unpredictable. Brando, in turn, grew incensed with what he perceived to be Kubrick’s sabotaging of his creative vision of the film, and took the unprecedented step of firing him. Kubrick’s contract with Brando did not allow him to discuss the conditions under which he left the project, but he did issue a statement saying that he resigned “with deep regret,” citing his admiration for Brando as “one of the world’s foremost artists.” In Frederic Raphael’s 1999 book, Eyes Wide Open, however, Kubrick claims that Brando had always wanted to direct the film itself, and had him thrown off the picture as a way of making it happen.

Brando indeed then made the bold move of stepping into the director’s chair himself. It was a career switch that was always in the wind, particularly considering Brando’s apparent distaste for the profession that had made him famous. “I have no respect for acting,” he once told Life. “Acting, by and large, is the expression of neurotic impulse. Acting is a bum’s life. You get paid for doing nothing and it means nothing.”

Once holding the reins, Brando proved just as unconventional as he did on screen. The neophyte’s directorial extravagance transformed a film scheduled for three months’ shooting at a cost of under $2,000,000 into a $6,000,000 blow-out, thanks to Brando’s now infamous love of shooting rolls and rolls of footage. The famed eccentric let the film keep running in the camera while his character sat on a beach, with his director’s eye dominating, waiting for the visually perfect wave to roll in. “We shot most of it at Big Sur and on the Monterey peninsula, where I slept with many pretty women and had a lot of laughs,” Brando wrote in Songs My Mother Taught Me. “Maybe I liked the picture so much because it left me with a lot of pleasant memories about the people in it…especially Karl Malden.”

Though his reflections on the film are amusingly sunny, Brando’s gleeful trashing of things like responsibility and commercial consideration resulted in the nascent director handing in a five-hour cut, which the film’s backing studio, Paramount, promptly removed from him and cut back to a more manageable 141 minutes. The film remains a true western oddity, full of against-the-grain characters, and built wholly effectively on the bizarre psychodrama that blasts away between Rio and the absolutely intentionally named Dad Longworth. It might be fascinating to imagine what the great Stanley Kubrick may have done with One-Eyed Jacks, but it’s hard to imagine it being much more hypnotic or unusual than the inventive and idiosyncratic western conjured up by Marlon Brando, who is equally brilliant in front of the camera in the film.

“One-Eyed Jacks was actually the last time that Brando acted out of true commitment, an uncynical passion for the material, and he gives one of his best performances,” wrote filmmaker and commentator, Peter Bogdanovich, for Indiewire. Tellingly, when he was asked who the real creative force was behind One-Eyed Jacks, co-star Karl Malden replied, “There is one answer to your question: Marlon Brando, a genius in our time.” Sadly, Brando would never direct again (though he did uncredited work on the little seen 1968 thriller, The Night Of The Following Day), joining Charles Laughton (The Night Of The Hunter) and Gary Oldman (Nil By Mouth) in that small club of actors-turned-one-time-brilliant-directors. “You work yourself to death,” Brando told Rolling Stone in 1975 of working on One-Eyed Jacks. “You’re the first one up in the morning…I mean, we shot that thing on the run, you know? You make up the dialogue the scene before, improvising, and your brain is going crazy.”

Heralded many, many years after its release by the likes of Martin Scorsese (who has called it “his favourite western”), Quentin Tarantino (who placed it at No. 5 on a published list of his best westerns), and David Lynch (who named a seedy casino/brothel in Twin Peaks after the film), One-Eyed Jacks was finally restored (and overseen by Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, no less) for a special screening at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which has now been shipped in for The Melbourne International Film Festival.

One-Eyed Jacks plays at The Melbourne International Film Festival on August 14. To buy tickets to One-Eyed Jacks, head to the official website.