In July 1963, the actor became the target of neo-Nazis brandishing racist epithets as he marched for equal housing rights at a whites-only housing development in Torrance, California. Later that summer, Brando would lock arms with fellow actors Paul Newman, Charlton Heston, Burt Lancaster, and his dear friend, author James Baldwin, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic March on Washington.
Though it’s fashionable now for celebrities to embrace political causes, Brando’s activism in the early 1960s was considered bold at a time when such activities were frowned upon by Hollywood power brokers. When pressed by a reporter at the march if he worried that his support for civil rights would cost him at the box office, Brando confidently replied that “whether it backfires or not is incidental to the cause,” before emphasizing that he was ready to pull his films from theaters that practiced discrimination.
Reflecting on how Brando paved the way for the activism of other artists in Hollywood, filmmaker Allan Arkush, who teaches at the American Film Institute, told me studio executives had little choice but to put up with it. “They didn’t tolerate it from many people … but Brando had power and he had magnetism, so they tolerated it from him.”
For much of his career, Brando’s relationship with the industry’s studio system could be described as tumultuous, to put it mildly. His infamous demands on the sets of Mutiny on the Bounty and Apocalypse Now, which involved script overhauls that brought production to a standstill, are mythical in the annals of Tinseltown lore, having shaped many of the Brando myths that loom large in popular memory. Yet, few films showcase both his masterful artistry and his imperfections than his sole directorial credit, One-Eyed Jacks, a revenge western originally set to be helmed by Stanley Kubrick.
Released in March 1961, a decade after his first Oscar-nominated performance and nearly 10 years to the day before production began on The Godfather—for which he earned his second and final golden statue—One-Eyed Jacks sees Brando navigating two eras as both star and director. Just as the country was on the brink of political change at the dawn of the Kennedy administration, the film stood at the confluence of classic Hollywood production and the emerging storytelling boldness of New Hollywood. “It was kind of a cross between the old style of production and the new styles that were going to come in in the sixties,” remarked Martin Scorsese during the introduction of his restoration of the film at the 2016 New York Film Festival.