Title: FILM: ALSO
SHOWING.(Features)
Date: 5/23/2003; Publication: The Independent (
Disliked on its original release in 1976, The Missouri Breaks has somehow
gained in enchantment over the years. With Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando on screen together for the first time, audiences
were expecting fireworks - Nicholson on a roll from One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest, Brando still the living legend of
American acting - but it didn't quite come together. A laconic Western written
by Thomas McGuane, its story of ranchers and rustlers
seems too slight to bear the pressure of these two major heavyweights.
Nicholson is actually rather good as the leader of a gang of
The same cannot be said for Brando, whose performance as the sadistic regulator Clayton is straight out of vaudeville and fatally unbalances the picture: wearing a variety of silly hats, he mumbles, farts, sings tunelessly, soliloquises to his horse and generally distracts the rest of the cast. (By this point in his career Brando was reading his lines off cue cards.)
One feels sorry for Nicholson, whose initial eagerness to work opposite Brando faded once he realised that the latter was off in a world of his own - he had virtually nothing to act against. Only one scene, where Brando shoots up a cabbage patch, offers a glimpse of how good their sparring might have been. Hard to know what the director Arthur Penn was doing all this time, aside from gazing on some beautiful frontier landscape and letting Brando get away with murder. The Missouri Breaks turned out to be the last significant film of Penn's career - far from scintillating, but better than its reputation suggests.
Return to Main Articles Menu Page or Return to Home