ONE-EYED JACKS (1961)

Marlon Brando directs himself in this handsome, lackluster VistaVision Western, hoping to add a bit of grey to the old white hat/black hat tradition. A variant on the oft-filmed Pat Garrett/Billy the Kid story, it’s hard to think of any telling that doesn’t bring some level of nuance to the bank robber pals, their partial reform and falling out. But if the real Kid was a murdering punk, ‘screen’ Billy is always either a ‘bad’ good man or (more typically) a ‘good’ bad man. Brando goes with the latter, but the film is so enervated it’s hard to care. As mentor/father-figure (subtly named ‘Dad’ here), Karl Malden does stare-down improv work against Brando that seems to add hours to a 140 minute running time. (Original cut three times that length.) While love-interest/daughter Pina Pellicer (looking much like Brando ex Pier Angeli) might be learning English & acting on the job. At least, character actors Ben Johnson & Elisha Cook Jr build a little tension in the pic’s one decent scene (a bank robbery gone wrong), but we’re soon back to numbing cogitation and a truly farcical prison escape. (Pellicer sneaks in a pearl-handled ‘lady’s’ pistol in a tamale wrapper!*) Film scholars & Hollywood heavyweights (Scorsese; Spielberg) take this seriously, the tortured production history is loaded with what-ifs (both Kubrick & Peckinpah had fingers in the pie), yet the film hasn’t even the honest decency to be a bust. It's merely mediocre.

DOUBLE-BILL: *Like Brando, Buster Keaton worked out Father/Son issues on screen in his great STEAMBOAT BILL, JR./’28. There’s even a scene with Buster trying to help Dad break out of jail with saws & hammers hidden in a loaf of bread. But Dad refuses the gift, causing Buster to complain to the jailer that ‘Father is ashamed of my baking.’