All 40 Marlon Brando Film Performances Ranked, in Honor of His 100th Birthday (2024)

40. ‘The Teahouse of the August Moon’ (1956)

The best that can be said about this culture-clash comedy — hugely popular in its day — is that it’s well-meaning. Adapted from a Vern J. Sneider novel and a Tony-winning John Patrick play, ‘The Teahouse of the August Moon’ tackles the tricky subject of the U.S. military occupation of Japan after World War II, spoofing the Americans’ attempts to monetize the local residents and customs. Brando’s all-but-unrecognizable performance as the helpful translator Sakini, while impressively committed, is impossibleto defend. The character is servile and wizened in ways that would look embarrassingly dated even if an actual Japanese actor were in the role. Played by a white Hollywood star born in Nebraska, Sakini’s tough to take. —NM

39. ‘Christopher Columbus: The Discovery’ (1992)

This largely (and justly) forgotten historical epic offers the worst of both worlds, Brando-wise. It’s one of those films from later in his career where he was paid millions for just a few scenes — in this case playing the Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada, who expresses doubts about the explorer Christopher Columbus’s plan to sail west and reach the Far East. Yet unlike some of Brando’s other, quirkier ‘blink and you’ll miss him’ guest-starring gigs, in ‘Christopher Columbus: The Discovery’ he brings no depth or life to his role. He mostly reads his lines in a lifeless monotone, with no sense of authoritarian menace. The performance is so flat that a sailor could fall off the edge of it. —NM

38. ‘The Nightcomers’ (1972)

A year before Brando revived his career with ‘The Godfather,’ he looked lost in this dreary gothic horror film, playing Irish gardener Peter Quint, who becomes a twisted life coach to two rich orphans living on a sprawling country estate. ‘The Nightcomers’ is meant to be a prequel to the Henry James novella ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ with Brando and Stephanie Beacham playing the characters who become the ghosts haunting James’s story. But Quint really could’ve been played by any of the dozens of UK stage and screen stars populating British cinema at the time. He didn’t need the Brando touch, and the actor seems to know it. Even when this movie takes a turn toward sexual perversity, Brando seems disengaged — nothing like how he’d be in ‘Last Tango in Paris,’ just two years later. —NM

37. ‘Candy’ (1968)

Brando arrives late in the running time of this dated psychedelic satire, based on the infamous erotic novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg (adapted to the screen by director Christian Marquand and screenwriter Buck Henry). Toward the end of the bawdy adventures of the wide-eyed and trusting teen beauty Candy Christian (Ewa Aulin), she walks into the back of a semi-truck trailer and finds a long-haired, white-robed guru named Grindl (Brando), with a phony Indian accent and a rapid-fire line of anti-materialist patter meant to persuade her that sex is the key to enlightenment. Brando is clearly having a great time doing his version of a Peter Sellers performance; and while his work can’t exactly be called ‘good,’ his one long, zany scene is an undeniable highlight in an otherwise exhaustingly hip movie. —NM

36. ‘A Countess from Hong Kong’ (1967)

Charlie Chaplin first conceived of this film in the early 1930s as a vehicle for his then-wife Paulette Goddard, but the long gestation period that ensued before its release in 1967 didn’t help the project improve with age — it’s easily the most stilted feature film that Chaplin ever wrote and directed, and sadly it was his last. Brando signed on to play a diplomat who falls in love with a displaced Russian countess (Sophia Loren) solely based on Chaplin’s reputation; there was no script when Brando came on board, and he quickly came to regret taking the job, especially since he found Chaplin’s autocratic directing methods incompatible with his own approach to filmmaking. The stale script and Chaplin’s stodgy pacing keep Brando from doing much with the part, though there are moments where his innate sense of comic timing transcends his material. Given the limitations of the piece and Brando’s offscreen misery, however, this is easily one of the actor’s least effective performances. —JH

35. ‘The Formula’ (1980)

This convoluted mystery-thriller is about a conspiracy to deprive the planet of cheap synthetic oil, uncovered by a Los Angeles cop played by George C. Scott. It’s also a prime example of Brando at his post-‘Godfather’ funkiest, taking big paydays for glorified cameo appearances and then just sort of doing his own thing during his few minutes of screen-time. Here he plays a jaded tycoon who repeatedly and unapologetically stymies the hero’s investigation. For no good reason, Brando wears old-age makeup, does an odd accent, and in his scenes with Scott holds his responses back a beat or two, as if purposefully trying to throw his fiery co-star off his game. It’s all fascinating to watch, if not exactly worth suffering through the two hours of tedious exposition around those Brando/Scott standoffs. —NM

34. ‘The Island of Dr. Moreau’ (1996)

With ‘The Island of Dr. Moreau,’ Marlon Brando became one of those rarified actors to win both an Academy Award and a Razzie. That might make his performance in ‘The Island of Dr. Moreau’ sound at least interesting, but in practice, what’s onscreen pales in comparison to all the behind-the-scenes disasters that plagued the 1996 sci-fi horror film. Much ink has been spilled about the cavalcade of drama on the set of the H.G. Wells adaptation — the director change from Richard Stanley to John Frankenheimer, the unprofessional and allegedly cruel behavior from star Val Kilmer towards his costars and crew — but the most iconic wrinkle in the story is undoubtedly Brando’s refusal to learn his lines playing the mad scientist Moreau, forcing production to feed him the script through an earpiece. Watching the film, it shows. Brando is only on screen for about 30 minutes in the film, and spends much of the time making long, awkward pauses in his philosophical diatribes about science and nature, like he’s waiting for his next cue. His erratic behavior during production — which has been attributed to grief from the then-recent suicide of his daughter Cheyenne as well as his hostile working relationship with Kilmer — at least led to him adding some interesting camp flourishes throughout the movie, including dressing up Moreau as a demonic Pope in his introduction and performing one intimate scene with a bucket of ice atop his head for no discernable reason. But on the whole, his utter lack of effort leads to the boring kind of bad rather than the fun kind of bad. —WC

33. ‘Désirée’ (1954)

Although Brando is top-billed in this historical drama, playing Napoleon Bonaparte, ‘Désirée’ really belongs to its leading lady, Jean Simmons. As Désirée Clary — a fascinating real-life woman whose romantic flirtations with Napoleon never quite panned out — Simmons gazes at Brando with a mix of awe, ardor, and fear. But because this Napoleon is, by design, a remote figure in the story, Brando’s performance is solid enough but too distant to leave an impression. ‘Désirée’ is another of the many Hollywood prestige pictures Brando made in the 1950s and ‘60s that didn’t really put him to good use. He was hired for his name, not his genius. —NM

32. ‘The Night of the Following Day’ (1968)

This dreary crime movie would be a must-miss if not for its cast, which includes Richard Boone as a steely, sad*stic kidnapper and Rita Moreno as his drug-addled accomplice. Brando plays a hired goon who quickly comes to realize that his new criminal associates are creepier and more dangerous than he’d prefer. ‘The Night of the Following Day’ is grim and violent, with a twist ending that feels more arbitrary than surprising; and critic Roger Ebert wasn’t wrong when he wrote in his review of the film that Brando just repeats notes he’d played before (‘the old Brando image of an inarticulate tough’) rather than sinking deeply into a complex character. But he definitely gets pushed more than usual by his capable costars; and his reactions are riveting to watch even when the picture turns tedious. —NM

31. ‘The Wild One’ (1953)

There’s the matter of what Brando represents, and then the matter of whether he’s actually delivering a great performance. The fame of ‘The Wild One’ is due to the former. You can imagine what a jolt it would have been in early 1954 to watch Brando mumble his way through his lines, clad in leather biker gear — here was a guy in the trappings of the still-nascent counterculture who didn’t seem to care about anything, including his performance. That carelessness is an expression of cool, right?

It’s summed up when a girl at a bar asks him, ‘What are you rebelling against?’ His reply: ‘What do you got?’ He’s opposition itself in the flesh. At his best, he’s incredibly natural — how many times would you have seen an actor rubbing their eyes or scratching their nose while delivering their lines before Brando? — but at his worst, there’s a laziness here. Some viewers simply filled in Brando’s lack of expression themselves, misreading his character’s empty headedness as depth.

It doesn’t help that director Laszlo Benedek, adapting material that first appeared as a story in Harper’s, gives ‘The Wild One’ a stodgy, moralistic, ‘could this happen in your town?’ gloss, and it feels barely capable of sustaining even its 79-minute runtime. If it had been made 12 months later it might have at least featured rock ‘n’ roll rather than the bebop on its soundtrack. Eight years later, in the film ‘Rome Adventure,’ a character talks about having just seen ‘a Marlon Brando antique’ — that’s how out of favor he was by that point — and it’s obvious she’s talking about ‘The Wild One,’ because she fantasizes about sitting behind him on a motorcycle. That’s what Brando is here: a fantasy, a poster, a Che Guevara T-shirt years before most people knew who Che Guevara was. In reality, there’s a healthy number of Elvis movies much better than ‘The Wild One.’ —CB

30. ‘The Brave’ (1997)

Never released in the U.S. in any form after the American press lambasted it at Cannes, Brando, after co-starring with him in ‘Don Juan de Marco,’ again worked with Johnny Depp, in his directorial debut. Brando played a wealthy man in a wheelchair who offers a young Native American father, desperate to provide for his family, $50,000 to be killed in a snuff film. His main scene plays like an acting class monologue as he philosophizes on death. This was his last role not done for a paycheck (he reportedly worked for free, out of friendship to Depp and sympathy for its theme of the plight of Native Americans), and when he is on-screen it actually is worth watching, even as he overcomes often otherwise clumsy writing. This was the third time Brando had been in competition at Cannes (after ‘Viva Zapata,’ for which he won Best Actor, and ‘Apocalypse Now,’ which won the Palme d’Or). —TB

29. ‘Free Money’ (1998)

This clunky, Coens-esque caper comedy sports an incomprehensible plot and thuddingly broad humor; but the worst thing about it is that it wastes one of Brando’s last lead performances, playing a dictatorial, Bible-thumping small town prison warden. Director Yves Simoneau didn’t bother to modulate Brando’s zaniness, which rarely fits cleanly with the more grounded work of the rest of the cast (including Donald Sutherland as a venerable judge, Mira Sorvino as his FBI Agent daughter, and Charlie Sheen and Thomas Haden Church as two low-ambition local dopes). So why is this still one of Brando’s better late-era roles? Because the actor was renowned for loving the silly and the vulgar but rarely got to show that side of himself on screen as robustly as he does in ‘Free Money.’ He is uncommonly engaged here, with his walrus mustache, cartoonish Midwestern accent, and insistence on shoving a cattle prod into the buttocks of anyone ‘fornicating.’ —NM

28. ‘The Chase’ (1966)

Arthur Penn’s film the year before ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ was top-heavy with other talent. It was one of producer Sam Spiegel’s last films (among earlier ones, ‘On the Waterfront’ and ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’) Throw in a screenplay by Lillian Hellman based on a novel and play by Horton Foote, and a cast to die for with Jane Fonda, Robert Redford (key early career roles), the then-little-known Robert Duvall, Angie Dickinson, veterans Miriam Hopkins, Martha Hyer, and, for the second time with her brother, Jocelyn Brando, and it’s understandable why this was a much-anticipated 1966 release.

The plot involves a sheriff of uneven reputation (Brando) in a town where a prisoner escapee’s (Redford) return is anticipated with anxiety. It’s a hothouse affair before even getting into its timing during the Civil Rights era and early in the Vietnam war, a mixture of old-fashioned Hollywood top-end filmmaking with a feint to the new generation with Penn and the younger actors.

It was one of Brando’s final conventional studio performances in the middle of his decline as a major presence. He manages to be a convincing enough Southern sheriff (with less baggage than the role suggests), including a physicality that he was declining as a central part of his acting.

Penn disowned the film (he lost editing oversight), and though the film has recovered its reputation to some degree in recent years, it remains a curiosity mainly as a transitional film for most of those involved. —TB

27. ‘The Appaloosa’ (1966)

This arty Wild West chase picture arrived a little too early for the revisionist and acid western waves that would hit a few years later; and Brando was reportedly never on the same page with his director Sidney J. Furie, who wanted to make something unique and imaginative (while Brando pegged the project as more run-of-the-mill). Nevertheless, Furie coaxed a compelling performance from Brando, who plays Matt Fletcher, a nomadic hunter in pursuit of his stolen horse. Matched up against John Saxon as a vicious bandit, Brando’s Matt seems genuinely challenged by his foe yet always angling for a way to exploit his weaknesses. A scene where the hero and villain arm wrestle on a scorpion-covered table is one of the strangest and most exciting sequences Brando appeared in during the ‘60s. —NM

26. ‘Morituri’ (1965)

These days, ‘Morituri’ is perhaps best known for its association with ‘Meet Marlon Brando,’ the short documentary that Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin shot during a publicity junket for the film. Clearly unenthusiastic about promoting another earnest World War II adventure — in which he plays a pacifist German engineer living abroad, away from the Nazis — Brando playfully bantered with the press, looking much livelier than he does in this picture. The movie’s actually not bad. It’s a bit stiff (as is true of many big-budget Hollywood dramas in this era); but its story of German civilians sharing a dangerous ocean voyage during wartime is tense and thematically rich. Still, Brando’s performance is too one-note, given the many layers to this character: a WWII abstainer forced to become an undercover saboteur. —NM

25. ‘Roots: The Next Generation’ (1979)

The 1979 sequel to the monumental ‘Roots’ covered the post-Civil War chapters of Alex Haley, Jr.’s book. The final episode of the miniseries included the author’s (played by James Earl Jones) interview for Playboy with American Nazi party leader George Lincoln Rockwell. Brando, in his only television performance other than two brief episodes before his film debut, won an Emmy for best supporting actor in a limited series.

It’s one scene, under 10 minutes, shot in one day (Brando, normally an expensive deal after ‘The Godfather’ accepted $25,000), but quite compelling as he conveys the charisma of the bigoted figure (well-known if not influential in the 1960s) as the two spar, including heavy use of the n-word by both men. As was common from the 1970s on, Brando is seated (among other things the better to read the cue cards he required for dialogue scenes), but, mostly in close-up, constantly invents tics and other bits of acting business to accompany Rockwell’s racism. It’s rare to see an actor of Jones’ talent and presence not dominate a scene, but Brando accomplishes that here.
One notable moment is Brando singing Rockwell’s racist version of ‘Mademoiselle from Armentieres.’ —TB

24. ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ (1962)

In all fairness, Marlon Brando and his character Fletcher Christian do have a lot in common. They’re both extremely charismatic and idiosyncratic forces. They both burn with an energy that far outshines those in power above them. And they both kind of lead everyone around them into a disaster. ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ was such a critical and commercial failure that it stranded Brando’s career on an island until Francis Ford Coppola arrived with a lifeboat named ‘The Godfather.’ But this movie is a fascinating artifact nonetheless. Brando couldn’t clash harder with what Trevor Howard is putting down as Captain Bligh, and it’s a demonstration in real time of the evolution of performance styles in Hollywood. He may be in his own movie, a little, but it’s fascinating to watch Brando try to carve out a command of his own.—SS

23. ‘A Dry White Season’ (1989)

Brando earned his final Oscar nomination for his supporting role in this anti-apartheid drama, which stars Donald Sutherland as Ben du Toit, a white South African teacher learning how deep the rot of racism runs in his nation’s government. When Ben chooses to fight in the courts against the police on behalf of his wrongly incarcerated Black gardener, he hires Brando’s Ian McKenzie, who makes a strong argument against bigoted complacency and corruption — to no avail. The actor is only in the film for about 15 minutes, nearly all of which he spends sitting in a chair and barely raising his voice above a mutter. But Brando took the part for a paltry salary because he believed fervently in the cause, and when his character finally does stand up and shout for justice, the effect is electric. —NM

22. ‘The Missouri Breaks’ (1976)

Arriving toward the end of both the New Hollywood revisionist western wave and the Brando revival that began with ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Last Tango in Paris,’ ‘The Missouri Breaks’ was roasted by critics for being slow and weird — more interested in the squalor of cattle rustlers and the grinding tedium of pioneer life than in crowd-pleasing shoot-‘em-up action. But the oddball vision of director Arthur Penn and screenwriter Thomas McGuane, while still an acquired taste, looks more artful now. Brando’s performance as a ruthless ‘regulator’ with a thick Irish brogue is inspired in its eccentricity. Tasked to track down a band of outlaws played by such unforgettable actors as Jack Nicholson, Frederic Forrest, Harry Dean Stanton, and Randy Quaid, Brando’s Robert E. Lee Clayton dons disguises and uses an array of unconventional weapons. He’s like a force of unholy vengeance, able to rid the frontier of freaks because he’s even freakier. —NM

21. ‘The Men’ (1950)

Already a Broadway sensation, Brando made his much-anticipated big-screen debut in this gritty social-issue docu-drama, set mostly in a VA hospital populated by soldiers learning to live with paralyzing injuries. Typical of a lot of producer Stanley Kramer’s movies, ‘The Men’ is intended to inform audiences about the practical realities of a difficult subject; and the combination of rapid-fire medical lectures and fiery speeches about overcoming obstacles often swamps Brando’s quietly intense performance, playing a once-proud Army officer stewing in self-pity after a sniper-shot severs his spinal cord. Still, the film remains a fascinating artifact of America’s post-WWII angst; and while Brando hadn’t yet figured out how to translate the nuances of his stage style to cinema, he was a master from the start at grabbing the viewer’s attention and holding it fast. —NM

20. ‘Sayonara’ (1957)

Based on a James Michener novel, ‘Sayonara’ uses the colorful exoticism of post-WWII Japan and the blatant emotional manipulation of romantic melodrama to tell a story about how social and cultural traditions can curdle into hateful bigotry. The Oscar-nominated Brando is very much in his ‘50s mumble mode here, playing Major Lloyd ‘Ace’ Gruver, a war-weary Air Force fighter pilot who initially disapproves when his friend Joe (Red Buttons) announces his engagement to a Japanese woman, until he finds his own head turned by a local dancer (Miiko Taka). Brando’s low-key naturalism doesn’t always align with this movie’s polished, big-budget Hollywood approach. (If anything, his affectations slow the pace of an already lumbering film.) But he brings a real sense of curiosity to this character, which becomes increasingly moving as the restless Ace realizes that the world won’t just let people love whomever they want. —NM

19. ‘The Young Lions’ (1958)

In the same way you have to hold in your mind that ‘Springtime For Hitler’ hit very differently for audiences only 20 or so years after the end of World War II, Edward Dymytryk’s ‘The Young Lions’ has even less margin of safety to portray German soldiers with any kind of nuance to American audiences in 1958. But that’s exactly what the film tries to do, specifically with Brando’s Wehrmacht lieutenant Christian Diestl. He goes from being young, scrappy, and hungry (and/or slightly arrogant) at the start of the war to becoming completely disillusioned by Nazi society by the end. Brando makes a meal of both extremes. Nothing that the character goes through is new emotional territory for the actor, and it’s arguable that ‘The Young Lions’ is the first movie where Brando is really on autopilot. But Marlon Brando’s autopilot is many other actors’ Space Mountain, and even here, there’s still a lot to enjoy.—SS

18. ‘The Score’ (2001)

Brando’s final film role suggests a road not taken for the last half of his career, if he had putmore effort and engagement into his high-paid guest-starring roles. Top billing in ‘The Score’ goes to Robert De Niro (playing a hyper-cautious old thief planning to retire after one last big heist) and Edward Norton (as a co*cky young crook who takes too many chances). Brando is the fence who pairs these two up to steal a Canadian national treasure, then keeps insisting they finish the job because he’s deeply in debt. It’s a true supporting role, rich and meaty; and Brando brings so much panache to it that it’s hard not to pine for all the great character parts for aging Hollywood legends that he didn’t take. —NM

17. ‘Don Juan DeMarco’ (1995)

Writer-director Jeremy Leven’s excessively corny romantic drama ‘Don Juan DeMarco’ is weighed down by a simplistic and borderline offensive story about a delusional, suicidal young man (played by Johnny Depp), whose insistence that he’s the legendary lover Don Juan proves inspiring to his burned out, soon-to-be-retired psychiatrist (played by Brando). But Depp and Brando — and Faye Dunaway, as the doctor’s long-neglected wife — work wonders with a weak script, bringing real passion and connection to their scenes together. Though Brando was in a few better films in the ‘80s and ‘90s, at the time this was his fullest role in about 20 years. It’s no glorified cameo; and it’s not a part loaded up with tics and affectations. (Depp handles the quirky stuff, and so well that it’s almost like a passing of the torch.) It’s one last commanding lead performance from one of cinema’s all-time greats. —NM

16. ‘Superman’ (1978)

Marlon Brando only clocks around 20 minutes of screen time in Richard Donner’s 1978 comic book extravaganza. But as Superman’s father Jor-El, he imbues the film with gravitas and a larger-than-life presence that hangs over the movie long after he disappears from it. At this point Brando’s performance in ‘Superman’ has been overshadowed by behind-the-scenes mythology: star Christopher Reeves’ accusations that he phoned in his performance, Donner’s tales about Brando’s odd decisions (like wanting to play the part ‘like a bagel’), the financial squabbling between Brando and Warner Bros. after he felt he was cheated out of profits even though he was paid more per minute than any other actor in Hollywood history to that point. Leaving all that aside, what’s on-screen remains magic; there’s no doubt that Warner Bros. got what they paid for when they gave Brando $3.7 million for his opening act tour de force, as he gives the film a sense of dignity and importance that sets the tone for everything to follow. —JH

15. ‘Burn!’ (1969)

Brando said his performance here was his favorite. This Italian 1969 film was directed by Gillo Pontecorvo following his international success with ‘The Battle of Algiers’ (including a Best Director nomination at the Oscars). It looked like a good match for the actor, already devoting energy and money to helping oppressed minorities and otherwise highlighting his anti-imperialist credentials. He chose this over ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ (he was offered the Sundance role) and reuniting with Elia Kazan on ‘The Arrangement.’

It is the final of his performances that suggested his youthful virility and swagger, with similarities to ‘Viva Zapata!’ and ‘Mutiny on the Bounty.’ Based in part on the 19thcentury American adventurer William Walker (who was played by Ed Harris in Alex Cox’s 1987 film, ‘Walker’), the film sees Brando play an agent for one European power fighting another for control of a Caribbean island, giving a performance that is both compelling and horrifying. It began a period where Brando gravitated to characters who combined evil with charisma (‘The Godfather,’ ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ‘Roots: The Next Generation,’ ‘The Brave’), conveying self-assurance and certainty of belief rather than the anguish his early roles tended to portray. —TB

14. ‘Bedtime Story’ (1964)

Later remade as ‘Dirty Rotten Scoundrels’ in 1988 (and in a gender-flipped version as ‘The Hustle’ in 2019), this slick comedy stands out from the mostly sober approach of Brando’s other 1960s movies… and ‘50s… and ‘70s. Brando plays Freddy, a sweet-talking American who competes with the sophisticated con man Lawrence (David Niven) to seduce and fleece the wealthy ladies of the French Riviera. The character is charming, shrewd and gleefully mischievous — very much unlike the more primal and brooding roles the actor usually played. Brando cited shooting ‘Bedtime Story’ as one of his favorite experiences from his erratic ‘60s gigs; and while the movie itself is too slow-paced for a farce, it’s a treat throughout to see Brando and Niven swapping quips and knowing looks. —NM

13. ‘Viva Zapata!’ (1952)

Marlon Brando was justly nominated for an Academy Award for this gleefully scenery-chewing performance as Emiliano Zapata in Elia Kazan’s rousing historical action film. Working from a John Steinbeck script, Brando and Kazan create a vibrant, inspiring portrait; while the casting of Brando as a Mexican revolutionary doesn’t look so great today, taking his performance in the context of its historical moment its energy, passion, and commitment is undeniable. It’s also a little silly, which is part of the fun – Brando externalizes every thought Zapata has with melodramatic aplomb, crinkling his eyebrows and mugging for the camera so that there’s never any doubt what Zapata is thinking, feeling, or hoping. It’s a larger-than-life performance that’s perfectly suited to the material, and that contains more infectious joy than any of Brando and Kazan’s other noteworthy collaborations. —JH

12. ‘Julius Caesar’ (1953)

This is where 1950s audiences realized that the dynamo of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ and ‘Viva Zapata!’ was the real deal. Brando disappears into the character of Mark Antony, holding his own with actors who’d been performing the Bard since he was in elementary school and bringing a degree of lived-in naturalism: Shakespeare, meet Stanislavski.

His performance in ‘Julius Caesar’ may not have as many Oscar-montage-worthy moments as ‘Streetcar’ or ‘On the Waterfront,’ but you feel genuine explosiveness when, his Antony standing over the body of his late mentor Caesar, he vows revenge with ‘Cry havoc! And let slip the dogs the war.’ For his efforts, he received his third-straight Oscar nomination for Best Actor, and Brando mania had reached such a peak that MGM even gave him first billing. That’s madness. In every respect, this is James Mason’s film, as Caesar’s assassin Brutus. Brando doesn’t even have his big moment — Antony’s ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen!’ speech — until a good 70-minutes have elapsed.

But Mason’s allure was distinctly different: At the very least he didn’t have Brando’s smolder. Listing Brando first paid off for MGM — the film grossed twice its budget and received five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. —CB

11. ‘The Ugly American’ (1963)

Reviews were mixed for this ripped-from-the-headlines political melodrama back in 1963, when its take on America’s misbegotten adventures in a fictional Southeast Asian country — clearly meant to evoke Vietnam — struck some critics as too defeatist, and perhaps even dangerously subversive. Today, ‘The Ugly American’ feels prescient in its portrait of a complacent diplomatic corp underestimating the anger of the local citizenry. More importantly, Brando gives an incredibly rich performance as an ambassador eager to help stabilize a country he thinks he knows well. The character’s mix of overconfident swagger and embarrassed self-doubt gives the star a lot to work with, and he makes great use of it all, depicting a particular kind of do-gooder who gets in way over his head. —NM

10. ‘Reflections in a Golden Eye’ (1967)

John Huston has directed some of the finest motion pictures of all time, though ‘Reflections in a Golden Eye’ isn’t one of them. Still, this sepia-tinged southern gothic curio from 1967 has plenty going for it — Carson McCullers source material, a vamping Elizabeth Taylor, and Marlon Brando as sexually repressed U.S. Army Major, who is so obviously gay that his orientation can hardly be chalked up as Hollywood-coded.

Huston’s camera aligns itself with Brando’s character and his obsession with a Private Lieutenant General called Williams. Who wouldn’t desire him? He’s played by a gorgeous Robert Forster. Brando was only 43 when filming ‘Reflections in a Golden Eye,’ but his premature physical dissipation and hard-living started to wear on him as early as his late 30s, suggesting a man much older, which makes Penderton’s repression and squirming desperation all the sadder. The role was turned down by a number of hot commodities in Hollywood before Brando took on the part, which suggested bravery on the part of the actor but also comfort in his own publicly fluid sexuality.

Brando always excelled at playing two men at once, or men where the semiotics of masculinity conceal a turbulent, sexually displaced psychic identity slipping out from underneath. That talent for balancing multiple layers without toppling over is full-throated in ‘Reflections in a Golden Eye.’ As despicable as Penderton can be — beating his horse as a projection of his own closetedness, his coveting of Williams that curdles to bloodthirst — Brando could always find the pathos beneath a villain. —RL

9. ‘The Fugitive Kind’ (1959)

Sidney Lumet was one of the greatest actors’ directors who ever lived, so it’s not surprising that when he teamed up with the greatest actor of his era, the results were electrifying. In a mesmerizing display of coiled energy, Brando plays Valentine ‘Snakeskin’ Xavier, a drifter on the run whose arrival in a small southern town leads to tragic consequences for nearly everyone he encounters. Brando’s scenes with co-star Anna Magnani are both explosive and haunting, with each actor expressing a seething undercurrent of dissatisfaction and bewilderment, and Brando handles Tennessee Williams’ ornate dialogue with deft skill, making it sound both convincing and lyrical. The movie was an adaptation of Williams’ play ‘Orpheus Descending,’ and the odd blend of Greek mythology and southern gothic shouldn’t really work; that it does is testimony to both Lumet’s firm directorial grip on the material and Brando’s daring, go for broke performance. —JH

8. ‘The Godfather’ (1972)

‘The Godfather’ marked Brando’s great comeback in 1972 (earning him his second Best Actor Oscar) after being considered box office poison for nearly a decade. However, Francis Ford Coppola wanted the screen legend for the starring role of Vito Corleone, the Mafia crime boss of New York, in his adaptation of Mario Puzo’s best-seller. And so did the author, who claimed he imagined the actor in the part when he wrote the novel. It finally came down to Brando and Laurence Olivier, and it took a lot of persuasion and negotiating to convince Paramount to sign the temperamental actor. The studio even insisted on Brando doing a screen test, for which he applied his own makeup (with cotton balls simulating Vito’s puffed cheeks).

Although Brando was initially skeptical about playing an Italian, he was intrigued about reinventing the gangster with greater nuance. He saw Vito as noble, heroic, and compassionate, and he portrayed him with thoughtful, quiet cunning. We see this instantly in the brilliant, shadowy introduction, in which undertaker Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto) asks the Godfather for retribution on the day of Connie’s (Talia Shire) wedding for the brutal beating of his daughter. After Bonasera’s solemn monologue, we reverse cut to Brando’s Vito, who offers sympathy but then annoyance at the undertaker’s disrespect for his power in protecting the Italian community. Throughout the wedding sequence, we observe the delicate balance between business and family that Vito firmly navigates as paternal leader, and how the latter takes precedence. The great improvisational stroke of genius was Coppola plopping a stray gray and white cat on Brando’s lap, which inspired the actor to display further humanity in his tender stroking of his newfound feline friend. The subsequent inciting incident — where drug baron Sollozzo (Al Lettieri) asks Vito to invest in his narcotics
business, for which Vito declines — adds a bittersweet layer to the rest of Brando’s performance as Vito struggles to keep his family and crime business intact when it becomes more ruthless.

The other two Brando standouts are the scene where Vito regretfully passes the torch to Michael (Al Pacino) while symbolically declaring his love for him, and his death scene in the garden where he plays with his grandson Anthony. Hoping to get a more authentic performance out of the child actor, Brando cut the orange peel beside him and put it in his mouth like fangs. It scared the boy at first, but it worked marvelously as he acts Kong-like before falling from his fatal heart attack. — BD

7. ‘Guys and Dolls’ (1955)

A Marlon Brando performance that is aces back to back. Gene Kelly (who was the filmmakers’ first thought for the role) leaves big tap shoes to fill, but Brando commits fully to the big, colorful artifice of this big, colorful Hollywood musical. For those who haven’t yet followed the fold, Brando plays Sky Masterson, an inveterate gambler who takes a bet to corrupt a pious Salvation Army sergeant (Jean Simmons) by scandalously luring her down to Cuba, where of course the two fall in love instead. There’s a kind of anthropological pleasure in watching him in the goofy gangster suits doing dance choreography with Frank Sinatra — it feels so not what Brando’s star image is. But the intensity and sincerity that Brando brings to all his roles is there in Sky, too. It’s an unexpected combination of story and actor, but ultimately one that you want to root for to work. Thankfully, it does.—SS

6. ‘The Freshman’ (1990)

Brando’s last great performance, and easily his best comedy role, came in this satire from Andrew Bergman (‘Honeymoon in Vegas,’ ‘It Could Happen to You.’). A risky premise (he plays a New York gangster who claims Vito Corleone was based on him) leads to an unlikely plot (innocent college student Matthew Broderick is entrapped in an effort to corral near-extinct animals for the dining pleasure of the gangster and some friends).

It’s hard to think of another Brando performance where he seems to be having as much fun as he does here. ‘Guys and Dolls’ had this, far more awkwardly. Self-parody isn’t something one associates with the actor, but he exhibits it here with grace and aplomb. And at one point he ice skates.

This is, similar to ‘The Godfather,’ an ensemble cast film (ranging from Maximillian Schell to Bert Parks, singing Bob Dylan’s ‘Maggie’s Farm.’) Brando clearly dominates it, but unlike so much of his later work, it is a balanced film. It’s impossible to imagine the film without him, but at the same time there is much more to it than just him. —TB

5. ‘Apocalypse Now’ (1979)

A typhoon wasn’t the only force of nature to rain chaos down upon the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now.’ There was the weather, and there was Marlon Brando. He showed up to the set in the Philippines in the summer of 1976 — where the filmmakers were already off their faces — overweight and blistering to rewrite the ending of Coppola’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ adaptation, retrofitted from the 19th century Congo to the Vietnam War. This was after Coppola basically had to bribe Brando, already on the outs with the filmmaker after declining his Best Actor Oscar for ‘The Godfather’ in 1973, to star in the movie.

Brando plays Colonel Kurtz, a once beloved Special Forces officer now gone rogue and possibly insane at a Cambodian jungle outpost, and now assigned to be assassinated by Martin Sheen’s traumatized Captain Willard. That Brando was overweight for the role meant being dramatically draped by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s chiaroscuro, and as Kurtz only appears in the final stretches of ‘Apocalypse Now,’ his imposing silhouette only makes him that much more mythic. Brando’s entitlement and tussles with the filmmakers and cast only enhance the towering contour of Brando’s performance, with the actor delivering a final eulogy — ‘the horror, the horror’ — for American participation in Vietnam War and, more broadly, human sin. While Brando gave Coppola hell on set, ‘Apocalypse Now’ would not be the iconic vision of hell it is without Brando’s terrifying performance. —RL

4. ‘One-Eyed Jacks’ (1961)

His one-and-only credited directorial effort, ‘One-Eyed Jacks’ was the flop that put Brando on the path to be considered box office poison for a decade. That’s deeply unfair: This is a smart, stirring Western that shows an obvious degree of emotional investment and care from Brando. And a real vision too: The Westerns that discard the dusty visual palette you think of with the genre — perhaps Anthony Mann’s ‘The Naked Spur,’ with its leafy forests and roaring rivers, or Sergio Corbucci’s ‘The Great Silence,’ with its enveloping snow — have their match in ‘One-Eyed Jacks,’ set largely on the beaches of Monterey, California, with the waves of the Pacific crashing in the background. You’ve never seen a Western that looks quite like this.

Brando deserves credit for wanting to do something distincly different here, including with his performance. As the outlaw Rio, abandoned by his partner Dad Longworth (Karl Malden) to face five years in a Mexican prison, he’s brimming with a coiled anger that melts to tenderness when he journeys up to Monterey, where Dad has installed himself as sheriff, and falls in love with Dad’s stepdaughter (an otherworldly Pina Pellicer). Freudian stuff, as the very names indicate, and played out with a brutality that was an obvious reference point for the Spaghetti Western auteurs to follow, down to Dad breaking Rio’s shooting hand, prompting a long period of convalescence — a plot point that appears in ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ and ‘Django.’ Brando brings remarkable understatedness even to lines like, in his final confrontation with Dad, ‘You’re a one-eyed jack. But I’ve seen your other face.’

A fraught production doomed it from the start, alas: Shooting began in 1958 but the film wasn’t released until 1961 as Brando discarded drafts of the script from Rod Serling and Sam Peckinpah, and original director Stanley Kubrick abruptly walked away two weeks before the cameras rolled. When asked who really wrote the script, Malden, 12 years older than Brando but clearly holding him in the highest esteem, said, ‘There is one answer to your question—Marlon Brando, a genius in our time.’ Wherever there’s that kind of extreme reverence, you know there’s a growing scorn in the industry too: And that would keep Brando’s work in the margins for the rest of the ‘60s. —CB

3. ‘Last Tango in Paris’ (1972)

You haven’t lived, I think, a full cinematic life until you’ve seen Bernardo Bertolucci’s ‘Last Tango in Paris.’ Pauline Kael said in 1972 that Bertolucci and star Marlon Brando ‘altered the face of an art form’ with their psychosexual drama about a wildly grieving widower who sparks up a no-strings fling with a young Parisian woman, played by Maria Schneider. Bertolucci’s undeniably powerful artistic expression, however, is stained irreversibly by an act of abuse the director and Brando perpetrated upon Schneider, a very act that is shown on camera. Schneider claimed she ‘felt humiliated and a little raped’by a simulated rape scene involving her, Brando, and a stick of butter that she said was not in the script. Bertolucci claimed she knew about the scene, but that the infamous ‘butter’ moment was improvised by the actor, and something Brando and Bertolucci deliberately concealed from Schneider.

Schneider and Brando remained friends until his death, though Schneider (who died in 2011) and Bertolucci (the last living, who died in 2018) never achieved an entente. And while this is not to minimize Schneider’s traumatizing experience, Brando felt violated in his own way by Bertolucci’s direction, as the movie cuts so close to the psychic bone of who Brando really was. Take a scene in which Paul, Brando’s expat in Paris, holds vigil beside his dead wife, who has committed suicide. The monologue was partly improvised by Brando, leaving the viewer to wonder how much he is channeling an impending split from his real-life wife, Tarita Teriipaia, whom he divorced after being 10 years married the year ‘Last Tango’ released.

Paul veers from blame and accusation to conciliation and apology, with Brando bellowing up a widening gulf of emotions in under five minutes. ‘Last Tango’ shows Brando at his most focused and least inhibited, indicating the actor was at his greatest with his guard down. For a film of such emotional Sturm und Drang, this is a simmering and subdued Brando performance, the actor’s outer shell ever so cracking to reveal his tormented insides; never had a director gotten that close to his essence. Which is a disturbing observation given the upsetting and exploitative on-set (and onscreen) dynamics of the movie. Brando and Bertolucci share in the achievement — a director degrading an actor who degrades himself, only to together degrade their collaborator — however awful. —RL

2. ‘On the Waterfront’ (1954)

A brilliantly pulled-in-all-directions Marlon Brando is an Elia Kazan stand-in in the director’s 1954 ‘On the Waterfront,’ which won Brando his first Best Actor Academy Award the next year. Brando’s Terry Malloy, a labor union dockworker in thrall to a mob boss (Lee Cobb), eventually doubles down on his reasons for turning over his gangster employers to the Waterfront Crime Commission in a powerfully rendered scene: ‘I’m glad what I done! You hear me? Glad what I done!’ The script may have been written by Budd Schulberg, but that’s really Elia Kazan talking, justifying why he testified against eight communist collaborators from his Globe Theatre days to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952.

Terry is a New Jersey longshoreman at the mercy of the mob controlling the port, torn between his allegiance to their iron hand and the desire to clear his name of the bad deeds he’s been asked to do on their behalf. That sounds a lot like Kazan, and in some ways like Brando himself, torn between the desire for artistic distinction and a fast-rocketing road to Hollywood fame that demands artistic compromise. ‘On the Waterfront’ is a winning fusion of art and commerce, with Brando locating a singular spiritual turmoil within Terry that couldn’t have possibly been shared with Kazan, the then-righteous filmmaker whom Terry was meant to echo.

That’s a testament to Brando’s genius for elevating material beyond what was expected. And while Terry’s rueful confession — ‘I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody instead of a bum’ — is now way oft-overused, there’s a reason it’s a part of cinema mythology. That was Brando there, too, stripping back a layer of the character to reveal a part of himself, the roiling waters of his own searchingness, as the greatest film performances always do. And he had a hell of a way with a monologue, as his all-time turn in ‘On the Waterfront’ so inimitably proved. —RL

1. ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ (1951)

If you’re not writhing on the floor of your brain at the first sight of Marlon Brando in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire,’ you must be a corpse. Brando, in only his second film role but here in true breakout form, radiates a smoldering animality never before seen onscreen, a steamroll of sexuality that could flatten any person. (And we know Brando dabbled in all kinds.) There’s that T-shirt, fitted by Lucinda Ballard onto Brando’s torso within a millimeter of his life, his physique, his speech impediment, his general oozing of sex from every pore.

But the trouble is that Stanley Kowalski, the working-class brute who beats his wife Stella (Kim Hunter) and beds her sister Blanche (Vivien Leigh), is not just a toxic man or terrible person, the kind of guy you want to burn your life to the ground for (as Blanche nearly does): He’s also a rapist. Director Elia Kazan, while working within the parameters of the Code, does not make that reality unsubtle in this faithful adaptation of the sweaty Tennessee Williams Southern Gothic. Now there’s a genre Brando knew his way around, psychosexual fever dreams that allowed him to both embrace and interrogate, deconstruct and denude, his masculinity.

What ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ shows us is the cost of surrendering to a man like Stanley who, in classic codependent, abusive relationship fashion, literally crumbles into a heap of himself screaming — you know the line — when Stella dumps him. And Brando was not afraid to embrace all sides of himself for ‘Streetcar.’ Yes, it’s a movie where women are humiliated and debased, but it’s also a movie where an actor is willing to humiliate and debase himself for a level of raw male screen performance that was, really, unparalleled in 1951. Yes, Brando is an animal sexual being in ‘Streetcar Named Desire’ — even the camera itself wants him — but he’s also showing us the dark underside of the allure of beauty, and that a man can be dangerously more than one thing. —RL