The $6,000,000 Method

One-Eyed Jacks (Pennebaker; Paramount). Marlon Brando has often announced that mere acting ("a childish thing ... by and large the expression of neurotic impulse'') is too small a bottle for his creative genie. In 1958 he got a chance to put aside childish things: he launched his first independent picture, planned as a nice, safe, medium-budget ($1,800,000) western. Producer: Brando. Star: Brando. Director: Stanley (Sparta-cits') Kubrick. Kubrick obviously had to go. and he soon did, leaving Brando with the megaphone and, as one Paramount saddle." executive put it, "Stanislavsky in the First day on the set. Brando tossed his script aside and mumbled to his actors: "We're going to improvise." And for the next six months, at an average cost of $42,000 a day, Brando improvised. Some times he just flicked on the cameras and let them roll while his actors ad-libbed --of 1 1 .000 ft. of film exposed one day. he used only 270 ft. in the finished picture.

When an actor accidentally belted him one. Brando happily reorganized his story to work the incident in. And the end of the picture is not the end Brando had in mind: the actors, in a democratic ballot, voted for one they liked better. Production was still further slowed by Brando's perfectionism. With a cast and crew on full salary, he sat for hours beside the Pacific Ocean and waited for the waves "to become more dramatic." For a drunk scene, he chugalugged a pint of vodka, got sincerely stoned and reportedly lost his supper -- but kept the footage.

As the months and the cameras rolled on and the pre-release cost nudged $6,000,000, the bankers began to hurt. But when they came whimpering to Brando, he only stared indignantly and replied in a genius-at-work tone of voice: "I'm shooting a movie, not a schedule." To the public he announced: "I want to communicate the things I think are important . .

to make a frontal assault on the temple of cliches." Unfortunately, Brando decided to fight cliche with cliche. After all the creative contortions and esthetic argy-bargy, One-Eyed Jacks turns out to be just a big, slick, commercial horse opera. The film, to be sure, is meticulously produced, directed, acted and "dited, and it is often startlingly beautiful to see--there is a sequence, photographed in Death Valley, that rivals in pure malign geology the finest frames of Sergei Eisenstein's Thunder over Mexico. Nevertheless, many spectators will wish that a little less of the beauty had been created by God and a little more by Brando, and others may realize that, if it were less pretentious. Jacks would be easier to recognize as. on the whole, a dang good shoot-'em-up show.

The hero (Brando) is the usual good bad guy. the villain (Karl Maiden) is the usual bad bad guy. and the story is pretty much the usual melodrama of revenge.

Villain betrays hero to the police. Hero breaks jail, rides out to kill his treacherous friend, now a sheriff. Pretending to let bygones be bygones, hero secretly seduces villain's stepdaughter (Pina Pellicer), who persuades him to live and let live--but don't sit too close to the screen.

In the last reel, the lead flies and the catchup spectacularly splatters.

The big action scenes, in fact, are ingenious and exciting. Brando seems to combine a small boy's infatuation with violence and a dancer's flair for movement. Director Brando, however, comes off much better than Actor Brando, the Method Cowboy, who incessantly mumbles, scratches, blinks, rubs his nose and sulks. In short. Brando plays the same character he always plays, the only character who seems to interest him: Marlon Brando. A childish thing indeed.

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