Regarded as one of the most prolific and influential actors of the 20th century, Marlon Brando had a profound cinema career spanning six decades. The sensational movie star is credited with being one of the first actors to bring the Stanislavski system of acting and method acting to movies and mainstream audiences, having studied with Stella Adler during the 1940s. Brando gained notoriety with his Oscar-nominated performance in the 1951 Southern Gothic drama A Streetcar Named Desire, skyrocketing to fame that led to popular appearances in renowned pictures like On the Waterfront, Viva Zapata! and Julius Caesar.
Following a slight career downturn in the 1960s, Brando came back with a vengeance in the renowned Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic 1972 crime masterpieceThe Godfather, in which he powerfully portrayed crime family patriarch Vito Corleone. He would keep starring in acclaimed films like the controversial erotic drama Last Tango in Paris and the epic 1979 war psychological drama Apocalypse Now, also directed by Francis Ford Coppola. During his lucrative and respected career, Brando won two Academy Awards and two Golden Globes and was a fierce activist in the civil rights movement and Native American movements. He remains one of the greatest and most admired (and allegedly most difficult) movie stars of all time. These are the best Marlon Brando movies.
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9 The Wild One
Columbia Pictures
Widely regarded as the original outlaw biker film, 1953’s crime drama The Wild One stars the legendary Marlon Brando as Johnny Strabler, and follows the rebel and his motorcycle gang as they wreak havoc on the California town of Wrightsville, where they battle with a rival gang and its helpless local sheriff. For the picture, Brando rode his own Triumph Thunderbird 6T motorcycle, and spent time with real-life biker gangs to absorb their mannerisms and speech; the character of Strabler became a cultural icon in the 1950s, bringing popularity to long sideburns, the Perfecto-style leather motorcycle jacket and tilted cap.
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An immortal exchange in the film is indicative of its style and influence on culture: a woman asks Johnny what he’s rebelling against, to which he replies, “What do you got?” Brando would later become surprised at the drama’s impact on teen rebellion, ’troubled youth’ movies, and the rock-and-roll generation, and felt deeply connected to the role, having revealed in his autobiography, “More than most parts I’ve played in the movies or onstage, I related to Johnny, and because of this, I believed I played him more sensitive and sympathetic than the script envisioned. There’s a line in the picture where he snarls, ‘Nobody tells me what to do.’ That’s exactly how I’ve felt all my life.”
8 Sayonara
Warner Bros.
Joshua Logan’s 1957 Technicolor drama Sayonara focuses on a US Air Force fighter pilot during the Korean War who falls in love with a beautiful Japanese dancer, and must confront his own opposition to marriages between American servicemen and Japanese women. The screenplay was adapted from the James Michener novel of the same name, and unlike most romantic dramas of the 1950s it tackles the topics of racism and prejudice head on. Logan and Brando initially clashed during production, partly due to the actor adopting a Southern drawl for the picture, but the director later praised Brando, telling writer Truman Capote, “I’ve never worked with such an exciting, inventive actor. He takes direction beautifully, and he always has something to add.”
Sayonara is considered by many scholars to have increased racial tolerance in the United States by openly discussing interracial marriage, an act at the time that was deemed controversial. Nonetheless, the drama went on to become a great success, earning 10 Academy Award nominations (including a Best Actor nod for Brando) and winning four.
7 Viva Zapata!
20th Century Fox
Detailing a fictionalized account of the life of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapato, Elia Kazan’s 1952 Western Viva Zapata! follows the historical leader from his peasant upbringing through his rise to power in the early 1900s, culminating with his death in 1919 from an ambush. Marlon Brando portrays the revolutionary, with famed author John Steinbeck having penned the screenplay; according to the biopic Marlon Brando: The Wild One, photographer Sam Shaw revealed, “Secretly, before the the picture started, he went to Mexico to the very town where Zapata lived and was born in and it was there that he studied the speech patterns of people, their behavior, movement.”
Brando was reportedly quite the jokester during filming, shooting off firecrackers in a hotel lobby, serenading co-star Jean Peters from a treetop at three in the morning and horrifying cast and crew by playing dead during a gunshot scene that ends Zapata’s life on-screen. Viva Zapata! earned Brandon an Oscar nomination for Best Actor and garnered praise from critics and audiences.
6 Last Tango in Paris
United Artists
Undeniably one of the cinema’s most controversial movies of the 20th century, Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 erotic drama Last Tango in Paris focuses on a recently widowed middle-aged American businessman who begins an anonymous relationship with a young Parisian woman. Bertolucci developed the premise of the picture based off his own sexual fantasies: “He once dreamed of seeing a beautiful nameless woman on the street and having sex with her without ever knowing who she was;” the director was also an art lover and drew inspiration from the works of artists Francis Bacon and Andy Warhol.
The film caused quite a public uproar upon its release due to its subject matter and graphic portrayal of sex, with Italian police even seizing all copies of the picture after its first week and declaring it “self-serving pornography.” Regardless, Last Tango in Paris ultimately went on to become a hit, with Brando’s portrayal being heralded and praised; The New Yorker wrote; “When Brando improvises within Bertolucci’s structure, his full art is realized; his performance is intuitive, rapt, princely. Working with Brando, Bertolucci achieves realism with the terror of actual experience still alive on the screen.”
5 Julius Caesar
Loew's, Inc.
For the 1953 film adaptation of the famous Shakespearean play Julius Caesar, Marlon Brando took on the impressive role of the Roman politician and general Mark Antony, appearing alongside fellow movie stars like James Mason, Louis Calhern, and Deborah Kerr in the epic picture. Brando’s casting in the drama was met with some skepticism, as he had acquired the nickname of “The Mumbler” following his performance in the Oscar-winning A Streetcar Named Desire; such naysayers were proven wrong as Brando went on to be a scene-stealer and commanded the attention of audiences.
The New York Times singled out Brando’s growth as an actor and his delivery, writing, “Happily, Mr. Brando’s diction, which has been guttural and slurred in previous films, is clear and precise in this instance. In him a major talent has emerged.” Brando won the BAFTA award for Best Foreign Actor, and Julius Caesar remains an outstanding and faithful Shakespeare adaptation.
4 On the Waterfront
Columbia Pictures Corporation
Marlon Brando won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his riveting portrayal of ex-prize fighter Terry Malloy in Elia Kazan’s 1954 crime drama On the Waterfront, which depicts the union violence and corruption amongst shoremen on the waterfronts of Hoboken, New Jersey. The gripping film focuses on dockworker Malloy as he struggles to take a stand against his corrupt union bosses after witnessing the murder of a longshoreman; he teams up with the dead man’s sister and a streetwise priest to testify against the local mob boss.
Kazan raved about Brando’s powerful performance and his profound instinctive understanding and ability to improvise, having said, “What other actor, when his brother draws a pistol to force him to do something shameful, would put his hand on the gun and push it away with the gentleness of a caress? Who else could read ‘Oh, Charlie!’ in a tone of reproach that is so loving and so melancholy and suggests the terrific depths of pain?… If there is a better performance by a man in the history of film in America, I don’t know what it is.” On the Waterfront won a whopping eight Oscars and is considered one of the greatest movies of all time.
3 A Streetcar Named Desire
Adapted from the Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, the 1951 Southern Gothic drama A Streetcar Named Desire features a brilliant cast, with the genius of Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, and Kim Hunter. The film tells the story of southern belle Blanche DeuBois who seeks refuge with her sister and brother-in-law in a rundown New Orleans apartment after experiencing a series of personal losses. Both Brando and Hunter reprised their original Broadway roles, with the former appearing as the hot-tempered Stanley Kowalski who shares a volatile relationship with his overly-understanding wife Stella (Hunter). The arrival of the flirtatious Blanche (Leigh) causes more problems for the pair, with Stanley’s cruel behavior a constant source of tension between the two sisters.
A Streetcar Named Desire helped skyrocket Brando to prominence as a major cinema star and nabbed him an Oscar nomination, and is widely regarded as the actor’s greatest and most memorable. Of the masterpiece picture, ABC Radio declared, “The emotions are dialed up to 11 by the sweltering New Orleans heat and Marlon Brando’s physique, which is matched by his titanic performance.”
2 Apocalypse Now
United Artists
The esteemed Francis Ford Coppola directed the critically-acclaimed 1979 epic psychological war drama Apocalypse Now, which follows a river journey by Captain Benjamin L. Willard from South Vietnam into Cambodia as he embarks on a secret mission to assassinate a renegade Army Special Forces officer Colonel Kurtz. Marlon Brando portrays Kurtz, the highly decorated officer who goes rogue and is accused of murder and presumed insane, with Martin Sheen appearing as the veteran assassin Willard tasked with eliminating him.
The brutally honest and gripping war movie is loosely based on the Joseph Conrad novella Heart of Darkness and filming was plagued by troubles: Brando showed up on set overweight (he was initially supposed to appear emaciated), Sheen suffered a heart attack and severe weather destroyed several expensive sets. Against such difficult odds, a rough cut of Apocalypse Now premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to prolonged applause and praise and was awarded the prestigious Palme d’Or. Regarded by many as one of the finest pictures ever made, the war drama won two Oscars and is notable for its outstanding performances by both Brando and Sheen.
1 The Godfather
Paramount Pictures
Chronicling the Corleone organized crime family under the aging patriarch Vito Corleone, the iconic 1972 crime film The Godfather centers on the transformation of Vito’s youngest son Michael, as he goes from reluctant family outsider to a ruthless mafia boss after gaining control of the illicit empire. Director Francis Ford Coppola helped adapt the screenplay for the famed picture with Mario Puzo, who wrote the best-selling novel the drama is based on; Coppola knew he had to get a remarkable actor to portray the monumental eponymous character, having revealed, “We finally figured we had to lure the best actor in the world. It was that simple. That boiled down to Laurence Olivier or Marlon Brando, who are the greatest actors in the world.”
Puzo himself had even envisioned Brando when he wrote the novel, and his performance earned rave reviews from critics and an Academy Award for Best Actor. The Godfather and Coppola’s portrayal of mobsters as people with psychological depth and complexity was unprecedented, and led to the picture being regarded as a landmark of the gangster genre and one of cinema’s most influential films ever created.
