Honestly? Twice I’ve sat down and tried to watch Bernard Wicki‘s Morituri (alternately called Saboteur: Code Name Morituri), and both times I’ve lost interest and turned it off. Maybe I’ll give it another looksee.
The best thing that came out of this 1965 film was a short documentary about Marlon Brando giving interviews to junket whores during the Morituri junket, which happened at Manhattan’s Hampshire House (150 Central Park South), in the late summer of ’65.
Meet Marlon Brando was shot and edited by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin. It’s a great Brando personality piece, and a reminder that he was quite the flirt (he charmingly hits on a pair of young female journalists plus a pretty Puerto Rican female passerby with a young son), and that nothing ups your chances like being famous.
Boilerplate: “After having appeared in a series of box-office disappointments, Brando agreed to promote Morituri for 20th Century Fox by participating in a day-long press junket at the Hampshire House in New York City. Brando was praised for his performance in Meet Marlon Brando by critic Howard Thompson, to wit: “The actor was never more appealing than in this candid-camera cameo, his best performance.”
The documentary premiered at the New York Film Festival in 1966. Since then, it has aired on French television but was not shown in its entirety in the United States until Fandor made it available on 11.15.13.