There is a legendary aspect to One-Eyed Jacks. The only film Marlon Brando ever directed, it became notorious because of Brando’s extravagant shooting style – miles of expensive film run through VistaVision cameras to catch the right wave, days waited for the light to be just right and so on.
The results were mixed. Brando has undeniably made a fantastic-looking film, and it features the man himself in a lead role when he was still beautiful and pumping pheromones. But it flopped badly on its 1961 debut and never really got another look-in, until the Film Foundation, with Spielberg and Scorsese backing, stumped up the money for a restoration.
I watched the Criterion Blu-ray, which uses that 2016 Film Foundation restoration as source material and it is epically good. Sharp, detailed and beautifully exposed. The DP is Charles Lang, who could do it all, from the noirish grit of The Big Heat to the wide-open lushness of The Magnificent Seven, and here he gives Brando the full Technicolor ticket, visually. The colour red pings off the screen, thanks to Lang’s careful lighting, which also immensely flatters the stars and turns almost every interior into a painting by an Old Master.
As to the film as a totality, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The story is elemental. Brando plays a bank-robbing desperado who is betrayed by his sidekick in the film’s opening moments and winds up in jail. Five years later he’s out again, determined to get payback, which arrives as a threefer deal. The sidekick is now a sheriff, he has a pretty step-daughter ripe for the picking and there’s a big bank in his town ready for heisting.
So, kill the sheriff, bed the step-daughter, rob the bank? It does not quite pan out that way but Brando sets up his grand arcs beautifully. The scene where the two men meet again for the first time since the betrayal is one of the all-time-great western moments.
The fact that the sheriff/sidekick is called Dad Longworth, who refers to his old compadre Rio almost invariably as “Kid” sets up Freudian expectations which Brando never really pursues. In fact subtext isn’t really his concern at all. He’s all about the surface, from the smooth skin of Rio’s charming face, to the big lollipop head (think Ariana Grande) of Pina Pellicer, who plays Dad’s step-daughter, Louisa. And, yes, the raging waves that Brando spent so much time catching. Much of the film is shot on the West Coast and it’s doubtful Pacific breakers have ever been used quite so grandly and ambitiously, particularly in a western. They roll, they boil, they crash, and they are magnificent, though they signify nothing very much at all (see also lack of subtext).
To Brando’s credit he tries to do the familiar western elements in a new way – like that novel gunfight finale with an ornamental fountain coming between the two men involved. He also uses his support cast very democratically. Karl Malden gets a lot of screen time as Dad, and is probably as good as he’s ever been. Is Longworth still venal or now reformed? Malden keeps us guessing. But also Slim Pickens as Sheriff Longworth’s lairy deputy and Ben Johnson and Sam Gilman as two tough nuts Rio meets on the road. Pellicer starts shaky but gets better, especially in the scenes where Rio is setting out to seduce her. Only Katy Jurado, as Dad’s new wife (he calls her “mother”), falls short, though that’s the character rather than the acting.
The editor is Archie Marshek, who worked on classics like The Cat and the Canary and The Glass Key and I suspect he’s this film secret sauce, tightening up what is still a flappy film in its finished state.
Imagine if Kubrick had directed this, as originally intended. Instead we have Brando, who is pretty good, though he’s turned out a grandly melodramatic soap opera rather than the primordial Greek epic he imagines he’s making. Did I say it looks good?
One-Eyed Jacks – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
