One-Eyed Jacks finds Marlon Brando using all his post-Streetcar clout to fund and self-direct a sprawling Western saga in which he could star, pose, woo, and wear a black hat and spurs in much the same iconic fashion he did motorcycle leathers in The Wild One, or a dirty vest in the Tennessee Williams movie. It opens with Brando's bank robber Kid Rio being left for dead in the desert by long-time partner Longworth (Karl Malden) in the wake of their most recent heist. As has already been established by their habit of referring to one another as "Kid" and "Dad", these two have a strange, more than likely allegorical bond: after serving five years in Sonora, the Kid busts out and finds Longworth has switched sides again, living in peaceful seclusion with his family as the sheriff of Monterey. This provides the perfect opportunity for Kid to ride into town with his new gang - again, shades of The Wild One, with horses in place of motorbikes - and begin working through his daddy issues.
The overall impression is of the kind of Tex-Mex vengeance saga that Peckinpah was later to goose into dynamism, and that Delmar Daves would have turned round within 80 minutes. At two hours plus, Brando's variant is a stubborn packmule of a movie, full of scenes in which the actors shuffle on to mumble their lines in true Method fashion, the director apparently subscribing to the notion that revenge is a dish best served cold indeed. (You sense he might only have got away with it in an age when Hollywood favoured the overblown and epic.)
The funny thing is, One-Eyed Jacks does have weight, particularly in addressing matters of sex and money, particularly whenever Brando and Malden share the screen. The film formulates itself into a Western precursor to Pasolini's Theorem, as Rio moves in with Longworth's new clan and - unlike the "good" cowboys of Shane or Hud, who came to be domesticated - immediately sets about stirring up trouble, seducing his host's stepdaughter with a heap of horse manure about being a secret Government agent.
Brando the director mines every conceivable trace of irony from these quote-unquote romantic scenes, in which the anti-hero feeds his quarry a line in the hope she'll spread her legs and rile dear Daddy; but he then flips this relationship to suggest the spark of sincere feeling that exists between the two characters - and gets a strange effect by casting an actress of unconventional looks (sad-eyed one-film wonder Pina Pellicar) who's surely too old to be playing gullible ingenues, giving their coupling something of a last-chance saloon feel.
From the acting style to its framing and content, it's absolutely a film that has its director's bullish personality stamped across it: it has all the tin stars, showdowns and shootouts you'd expect from a studio-backed turn-of-the-60s Western, but also - in such scenes as the one that finds Malden tying Brando to a post and whipping him into submission - a lipsmacking, semi-camp strain of perversity that fits with the Brando who would drag up for The Missouri Breaks a decade or so later.
One-Eyed Jacks is available on DVD through Network.
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