The Missouri Breaks and Burn!

Marlon Brando turned down Robert Redford's role in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to make 1969's Burn! then, 7 years later, he starred in The Missouri Breaks, which was promoted as a revisionist western in the Butch and Sundance vein with a Newman and Redford-esque pairing of Brando and Jack Nicholson. The recent release of these obscure Brando efforts on DVD gives us the opportunity to consider two films that are each essentially about the intersection of capitalism and violence in establishing and perpetuating "civilized" society.

The third Western for both Brando (One-Eyed Jacks, The Appaloosa) and director Arthur Penn (Little Big Man, The Left Handed Gun), The Missouri Breaks unfolds in post-Civil War Montana, as wealthy rancher David Braxton begins hanging cattle rustlers without trials to protect his Badlands' outpost from annual 7% losses. The rustlers, led by laid back Tom Logan (Nicholson), retaliate by setting up a way-station under Braxton's nose and hanging his foreman. In turn, Braxton hires unhinged regulator (sniper/bounty hunter) Robert E. Lee Clayton (Brando) to eliminate his foes.

Gillo Pontecorvo's (The Battle of Algiers) Burn! replaces cattle with sugar cane and Montana with a mid-19th Century Carribean island, but capitalism remains the enemy. Brando's William Walker is a British agent provocateur dispatched to an island in the Lesser Antilles to incite and then repress a revolution by the imported slave laborers against their colonialist Portuguese rulers so that he can deliver the sugar trade to the Crown. A decade later, the sugar conglomerate that now essentially rules the island calls the hermetic Walker back into duty and he burns half the island in a General Sherman-like march to smoke out the "insurgents" lest slaves on neighboring islands take their lead.

Opening with executions and concluding with similar downbeat endings, both films have elliptical, picaresque, and subversive screenplays that likely sealed their commercial fates. Scripted by western veteran Thomas McGuane (Rancho Deluxe) with an uncredited polish by Nicholson's Chinatown pal Robert Towne, The Missouri Breaks consistently plays against genre expectations, much like Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller.

Logan finds that he prefers farming to thieving, his feckless crew (composed of note perfect character actors such as Harry Dean Stanton and Frederic Forrest) is outwitted by Canadian Mounties and it's Braxton's blunt daughter who comes on to the reluctant Logan. Meanwhile, Franco Solinas and Girorgio Arolino's Burn! script is a Vietnam allegory that deftly toes the line between a Joseph Conrad tale and a Marxist, anti-imperialist diatribe.

Each film favors long shots and roving cameras that contrast pastoral vistas with the violence that peppers them. Penn thoroughly deglamorizes the violence in most Westerns, while Pontecorvo continually eschews the bluster of battle, presenting only the bloody aftermath. Both scores are forebodingly percussive and contain some expected elements: harmonica and banjo in John Williams' score for The Missouri Breaks and a recurring tribal chant that takes on very different meanings as Burn! plays out. There's also, however, jarring harpsichord in Williams' score and twangy organ in Ennio Morricone's Burn! score that set discomfiting tones.

Burn! is a must-see as Brando, the actor many feel was the best ever, gives a performance containing what he thought was the best acting he'd ever done. Many rank Brando's eccentrically effete performance in The Missouri Breaks as one of his worst, but his performance works if you watch the movie with the understanding that his character is insane (Roger Ebert said the same about Forrest Whitaker's modern samurai cum mob assassin in Ghost Dog who, like Brando's regulator, has more of a connection with animals than the people he kills).

Nicholson is nicely understated and his scenes with Brando are as compelling as the latter's interactions with De Niro in The Score but, regrettably, they're also just as infrequent. Conversely, in Burn!, Brando is surrounded mainly by non-professional actors whose wooden mannerisms and dubbed dialogue create a disconcerting effect.

Both films have Dolby Digital mono sound and The Missouri Breaks is presented in an adequate 1.85 anamorphic widescreen transfer. The same can't be said of Burn!'s grainy, non-anamorphic 1.66:1 widescreen transfer, which clocks in at 112 minutes. There's apparently a 132 minute subtitled cut under the film's original title, Quiemeda, which actually translates to the more appropriate Burnt.

That version, though, apparently has Brando poorly dubbed in Italian with the extra 20 minutes consisting mostly of Marxist musings, so it's questionable how much we're being shortchanged. Neither film has any special features to speak of, but it's interesting to watch each with the insight from Brando's autobiography that a lot of pot was smoked on both sets. -- Colin Miller