One-Eyed Jacks

With Peckinpah's script, Pennebaker Productions (Brando's film company) approached the young Stanley Kubrick. Brando had been impressed with Kubrick's first two features, Killer's Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956) and he was convinced that Kubrick was the right man for the job. "We've got to get Kubrick," he is reported to have said. Kubrick agreed to direct but insisted on a new script by Calder Willingham. Karl Malden signed on and the producer, Frank Rosenberg, went to Mexico to search for an actress to play the young love interest. He returned after signing Pina Pellicer for her first film role.

What happened next is less clear. Brando, Kubrick, Willingham, Rosenberg and Carlo Fiore (a friend of Brando's and an assistant on the film) met regularly up at Brando's home overlooking Coldwater Canyon. Brando required that all the men remove their shoes so as not to scratch the wood floor. Kubrick often removed his pants as well, choosing to work in nothing but his shirt and underwear. After many delays and many hours arguing up at Brando's house, Willingham left and was replaced by Guy Trosper. Brando and Kubrick repeatedly clashed over the issue of character development (it's probably safe to assume that Brando wanted more and Kubrick less), but things finally came to a head when Brando overheard Kubrick making a crack about an actress Brando was smitten with. Kubrick was immediately fired, though the official press release stated that he had resigned to work on Lolita.

With filming set to start in a month, Brando volunteered himself for the job of director. Paramount agreed, even though as Brando himself recounted in his 1994 autobiography, "I didn't know what to do." Five days into shooting, Brando was two weeks behind schedule, a neat mathematical trick. With a Method actor at the helm, actors were encouraged to improvise; one Paramount executive dubbed the film "Stanislavsky in the saddle." Stories circulated in the press about Brando's odd behavior (something that continues to this day). He insisted on getting drunk to film a scene in which he was supposed to act drunk, but he got too drunk to act or direct and so he insisted on repeating the process another day. Again he got too drunk to direct or act. Another time, Brando made everyone sit around while he waited for the "right" wave off the Monterey coast. According to the film's producer, Frank Rosenberg, Brando "pondered each camera set up while 120 members of the company sprawled on the ground like battle-weary troops, or gazed at the seals playing in the swelling seas." Throughout all this, Brando kept shooting. They eventually printed close to 250,000 feet of film (the average is 150,000). All this while utilizing the Vista-Vision process, which cost fifty cents a foot! In the end, the film, originally budgeted at $1.8 million, wound up with a price tag of $6 million.

Brando has called One-Eyed Jacks "one of my favorite pictures." But the ending was not what he intended. Brando's original edit of the film ran 4 hours and 42 minutes. He then, as he put it, "got pretty sick of it and turned the job over to someone else." After he walked away from the editing, the studio cut the picture down to a manageable 141 minutes and added a new ending, which was filmed almost a year after principal photography was completed. According to Brando: "I don't feel it's what I set out to do. In my film, everybody lied, even the girl. The only one who told the truth was the Karl Malden character. Paramount made him out to be the heavy, a liar . . . . Now the characters in the film are black and white, not gray and human as I planned them." How much of Brando's version is true is hard to tell as he has a notorious history of bad-mouthing his pictures just as they are about to be released.

This was the third and final pairing of Brando and Malden, marking the end of a memorable working relationship. Katy Jurado (High Noon [1952], Broken Lance [1954]) is terrific as Maria, Malden's wife, and, in her only US film appearance, Pina Pellicer is well cast in the role of Louisa. Sadly, after a brief film career in Mexico, she committed suicide at the age of 24. Slim Pickens is wonderful as the sadistic deputy sheriff. Brando also borrowed two actors from John Ford's stable: Ben Johnson and Hank Worden. And watch for a quick appearance by Elisha Cook Jr.

Brando claimed that he wanted to make a "frontal assault on the temple of cliches." But according to David Shipman, "you'd have to go back to William S. Hart to find a Western hero so lacking in heroic qualities." Indeed, many reviewers found the film oddly cliched itself. Time magazine, for instance, called it "A horse opera" and claimed it was "the usual melodrama of revenge." But the New York Times called it "extraordinary" and claimed, "It is as if it had been jointly directed by John Huston and Raoul Walsh." All reviewers, however, took note of the stunning cinematography by Charles Lang. Lang's use of color and the contrasting locations of Sonora, Mexico and Monterey, California make One-Eyed Jacks an aesthetic treat and well worth another look.

Producer: Frank P. Rosenberg
Director: Marlon Brando
Screenplay: Guy Trosper, Calder Willingham, based on a novel by Charles Neider
Art Direction: J. McMillan Johnson, Hal Pereira
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Costume Design: Yvonne Wood
Film Editing: Archie Marshek
Original Music: Hugo Friedhofer
Principal Cast: Marlon Brando (Rio), Karl Malden (Dad Longworth), Pina Pellicer (Louisa), Katy Jurado (Maria), Ben Johnson (Bob Amory), Slim Pickens (Deputy Lon Dedrick), Timothy Carey (Howard Tetley), Elisha Cook, Jr. (Carvey), Ray Teal (Barney), Larry Duran (Chico), Sam Gilman (Harvey Johnson).
C-142m. Letterboxed.

by Mark Frankel

KATY JURADO, 1924 - 2002

Katy Jurado, an Oscar nominee and major actress in Westerns, died July 5th at the age of 78. She was born in Guadalajara, Mexico on January 16th 1924 as Maria Cristina Estella Marcela Jurado Garcia, daughter of a cattle rancher and an opera singer. Jurado started to appear in Mexican films in 1943. After 15 films in her native country, director Budd Boetticher saw Jurado attending a bullfight (Jurado wrote about the subject for Mexican newspapers) and cast her in his Bullfighter and the Lady (1952), her Hollywood debut. For much of her career Jurado alternated between the two film industries. In the US, she was memorable for the sensual energy she brought to roles in High Noon (1952), One-Eyed Jacks (1961) which was directed by Marlon Brando, Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) and John Huston's Under the Volcano (1984). She was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for Broken Lance (1954). Jurado's Mexican films were in a broader range of genres and included Luis Bunuel's El Bruto (1952), Ismael Rodriguez's We the Poor and Miguel Littin's The Widow Montiel (1979). She won three Ariel Awards (Mexican equivalent to the Oscars) and one special award. She was married to Ernest Borgnine from the end of 1959 to summer 1963. One of her final films was The Hi-Lo Country (1998), a contemporary Western directed by Stephen Frears and co-starring Woody Harrelson, Billy Crudup and Penelope Cruz.

by Lang Thompson

DOLORES GRAY, 1924 - 2002

Broadway and nightclub star Dolores Gray died June 26th at the age of 78. Her movie career was brief but consisted of high-profile MGM musicals which guaranteed her a place in film history. Gray was born in Chicago on June 7th, 1924 (and where, according to a common story, she was accidentally shot by a gangster as a child and had a bullet in her lung her entire life). As a teenager she began singing in California until Rudy Vallee featured her on his radio show. Gray moved to Broadway in 1944 and then to the London stage in 1947, solidifying her reputation as a singer/actress while constantly giving the gossip columnists plenty to write about. She had two small singing roles in Lady for a Night (1941) and Mr. Skeffington (1944) but didn't really light up the big screen until It's Always Fair Weather (1955) even though Gray reportedly didn't much care for the role. Her rendition of "Thanks a Lot, But No Thanks," which has her gunning down a slew of male dancers on-stage and kicking them through trap doors, is a genuine showstopper. Three more unforgettable musical roles quickly followed: Kismet (1955), The Opposite Sex (1956, which Gray turned down Funny Face to do) and Designing Women (1957). That was it for Gray's film career. She kept busy with TV appearances (mostly singing though she did one 1988 episode of the cult show Dr. Who) and a busy recording and nightclub schedule. In 1987, she appeared in a British production of Follies at Stephen Sondheim's request.

by Lang Thompson

ROD STEIGER, 1925 - 2002

From the docks of New York to the rural back roads of Mississippi to the war torn Russian steppes, Rod Steiger reveled in creating some of the most overpowering and difficult men on the screen. He could be a total scoundrel, embodying Machiavelli's idiom that "it's better to be feared than loved" in the movies. But as an actor he refused to be typecast and his wide range included characters who were secretly tormented (The Pawnbroker, 1965) or loners (Run of the Arrow, 1965) or eccentrics (The Loved One, 1965).

Along with Marlon Brando, Steiger helped bring the 'Method School' from the Group Theater and Actors Studio in New York to the screens of Hollywood. The Method technique, taught by Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg, insisted on complete immersion into the character's psyche and resulted in intense, dramatic performances and performers. Steiger made his first significant screen appearance as Brando's older brother in On the Waterfront (1954). Their climatic scene together in a taxicab is one of the great moments in American cinema.

It was a short leap from playing a crooked lawyer in On the Waterfront to playing the shady boxing promoter in The Harder They Fall (1956). Based on the tragic tale of true-life fighter Primo Carnera, The Harder They Fall details the corruption behind the scenes of professional boxing bouts. Steiger is a fight manager named Nick Benko who enlists newspaperman Eddie Willis (Humphrey Bogart in his final screen appearance) to drum up publicity for a fixed prizefight. While the boxing scenes were often brutally realistic, the most powerful dramatic moments took place between Steiger and Bogart on the sidelines.

As mob boss Al Capone (1959), Steiger got to play another man you loved to hate. He vividly depicted the criminal from his swaggering early days to his pathetic demise from syphilis. In Doctor Zhivago (1965), Steiger was the only American in the international cast, playing the hateful and perverse Komarovsky. During the production of Dr. Zhivago, Steiger often found himself at odds with director David Lean. Schooled in the British tradition, Lean valued the integrity of the script and demanded that actors remain faithful to the script. Steiger, on the other hand, relied on improvisation and spontaneity. When kissing the lovely Lara (played by Julie Christie), Steiger jammed his tongue into Christie's mouth to produce the desired reaction - disgust. It worked! While it might not have been Lean's approach, it brought a grittier edge to the prestige production and made Komarovsky is a detestable but truly memorable figure.

Steiger dared audiences to dislike him. As the smalltown southern Sheriff Gillespie in In The Heat of the Night (1967), Steiger embodied all the prejudices and suspicions of a racist. When a black northern lawyer, played by Sidney Poitier, arrives on the crime scene, Gillespie is forced to recognize his fellow man as an equal despite skin color. Here, Steiger's character started as a bigot and developed into a better man. He finally claimed a Best Actor Academy Award for his performance as Sheriff Gillespie.

Steiger was an actor's actor. A chameleon who didn't think twice about diving into challenging roles that others would shy away from. In the Private Screenings interview he did with host Robert Osborne he admitted that Paul Muni was one of his idols because of his total immersion into his roles. Steiger said, "I believe actors are supposed to create different human beings." And Steiger showed us a rich and diverse cross section of them.

by Jeremy Geltzer & Jeff Stafford