Review: One-Eyed Jacks
Blu-ray and DVD: OnEyed Jacks (1961)
Rio (Marlon Brando) and Dad Longworth (Karl Malden) are moderately successful bank robbers. After Dad double crosses Rio resulting in him spending 5 years in jail, Rio searches for Longworth to exact his revenge, but then he meets Longworth’s stepdaughter Louisa (Pina Pellicer) and falls in love.
Imagine the scene…there is so much infighting between star Brando, writer Sam Peckinpah, Director Stanley Kubrick and Producer Frank Rosenberg, that Brando insists they sit around a table. Brando has a gong, and after 2 minutes he bangs the gong so the next person can say their piece..until its Kubricks turn. Brando yawns and looks at his watch, and after realising Brando won’t listen, Kubrick leaves the movie.
From the beginning, One-Eyed Jacks was a film with a very troubled history. Almost having a dream team of Peckinpah, Brando and Kubrick makes the mind boggle, and knowing that Brando’s (who took over the reins as director) original cut is over FIVE hours long is enough to make any Western fan faint.
Brando is Rio, a bank-robber who is so incredibly handsome it takes 20 minutes to realise that the camera may be lingering a little too long in close-up on that eagle nosed profile. Oh yes, Brando may have been a rookie director and commentators reveal he was indecisive and troubled, hence all the footage filmed, but Brando really knew how to be the centre of attention. Not so much of that ‘naturalistic’ actors studio style here, but rather a good solid Western, with a story that interestingly portrays the characters as shades of grey, rather than men with black and white hats.
The acting in this film is of course, wonderful. Ben Johnson (The Getaway, The Last Picture show) plays Bob Amoury as a villain who is just human rather than evil. Brando’s love interest Pina Pellicer is the perfect engenue, misty eyed yet resolute (she sadly committed suicide only a few years later), her trembling lip and tear filled eyes at realising Rio was using her made me have a bit of a lump in my throat. What can one say about the great Karl Malden? So evil yet he cares for his wife and stepdaughter, why he’s even the sheriff now and when the opportunity arises to kill Rio, he whips him and banishes him instead.
This is an outstanding new 4K restoration from Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Film Foundation’, and I can say hand on heart that despite having an ending that was obviously tagged on at the end (and after some research I found it to be true), this is a really great Western; vibrant, unusual and entertaining. It’s in my top 10 Westerns from now on.
SPECIAL EDITION CONTENTS:
- New 4K restoration by Universal Pictures and The Film Foundation, in consultation with Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg
- High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentations
- Uncompressed Mono 1.0 PCM Audio
- Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- Brand new audio commentary by Stephen Prince, author of Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies, recorded exclusively for this release
- Introduction by Martin Scorsese
- Marlon Brando: The Wild One, Paul Joyce’s 1996 documentary on the actor, featuring interviews with Dennis Hopper, Shelley Winters, Martin Sheen and Anthony Hopkins
- Additional, previously unseen interview material from Marlon Brando: The Wild One with Francis Ford Coppola and Arthur Penn
- Theatrical trailer
- Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Jacob Phillips
FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Illustrated collector’s booklet containing new writing on the film by Jason Wood and Filippo Ulivieri, Karl Malden on Marlon Brando, Paul Joyce on Marlon Brando: The Wild One and an excerpt from Stefan Kanfer’s Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando.
Review by Tina (co-host of 60 Minutes With) from a disc kindly supplied by Fetch Publicity from Arrow Films.