When Francis Ford Coppola hired Marlon Brando for a cool mill to do his thing as Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, the controversy was huge; and the complaint was that Brando was huge in girth and did not fit in the part of the renegade jungle commander of Montagnard tribesmen. Coppola, jillions of dollars over budget and many moons over schedule, shot Brando in shadows and at angles to "hide" Brando's weight.
Back when the movie came out, a lot of people who saw the movie thought Marlon Brando and the movie were terrible. I loved Brando in the part. His "girth" added only power to his interpretation of the supposedly-demented Colonel Kurtz. He communicated "the horror" and the futility of war to this audience of one like no other had before or since.
And I'm saying two more things, leaving out the filmography of the greatest movies of all time in which he appeared. As brilliant as I thought he was in Apocalypse Now, Brando is why producers and directors should never cast a white guy as Japanese, which was done in Teahouse of the August Moon. And Brando said in an interview, just after the film was in the can and before its release, that the worst movie he ever made was The Freshman, which, I think, was hyperbole because he was terrific in this comedy -- if you have not seen the movie, you must put it on the "must see" list for the family.
Posted by Bill at July 2, 2004 03:05 PMI hate when they cast white people as Asians. Blech.
Posted by: pink lotus at July 2, 2004 03:26 PMBrando was a looker when he was younger.
Posted by: Michelle at July 2, 2004 04:12 PM