The music video for MIA’s Born Free imagines a ginger genocide, with humvees of jackbooted, gas-masked stormtroopers raiding a high-rise housing complex to round up redheads. Even before the condemned are bussed out to the desert and used for target practice, the camerawork luxuriates in extreme content – needless collateral brutalization, a slow-mo close-up of a man smoking from a glass stem, a harsh coitus interruptus for a nude couple. All the while, a driving synth loop and kinetic cinematography keep things moving at a brisk, exciting clip befitting the high-energy banger at hand; one of the goons mugs through the fourth wall and lip-syncs a “whoo!” in time with the track.
The video has far more use for the edgy textures of state-sponsored violence than its messy realities, the intellectual engagement topping out at “ethnic cleansing is bad, and who knows, it could happen to you!” At nine minutes, this doesn’t pose such a pressing problem for the director Romain Gavras as it did on his 2022 feature Athena, wherein spectacular formal pyrotechnics gave way to the conclusion that riot police and proletarian protesters have something to learn about getting along. These atrocities may be ghastly, but that’s hardly the point. This stuff makes for cracking footage, every headshot worthy of a post on One Perfect Shot.
The core sample in Born Free comes from 70s electro-punk pioneers Suicide, whose music opens and closes the road trip from hell undertaken by a quartet of journalists in the new action film Civil War. The on-the-nose strains of Rocket USA creep in as their car cuts a swath down a highway clogged with abandoned vehicles, a sight announced when the grizzled lifer tells their party’s drowsy newbie, “You don’t want to miss this.” Once covered by Bruce Springsteen, perhaps the most American man alive, Dream Baby Dream appends a smirky punch line to an act of mercilessness not so far from plausibility for a stunning 40% of US citizens. As the star-spangled empire crumbles, we get to jam out to avant-psych outfit Silver Apples and a funky-fresh broadside against the crack epidemic from De La Soul in between white-knuckle set pieces. Whatever the director Alex Garland’s ambitions, and he’s now spoken about them at length, his primary concern seems to be that nobody gets bored during his meditation on the senseless horror of war.
Many of Garland’s reviewers and interviewers have taken him to task for a perceived political cowardice in his vague mapping of a United States ruptured by internal conflict. We don’t get a Star Wars-style preamble crawl of neatly packaged context, but we learn that the president (Nick Offerman, whose red-meat-fed, heartland-coded persona counts as a clue) has forcibly taken a third term, disbanded the FBI, and executed members of the press in public view. If that’s not enough to go off of, his only supporter with dialogue (Jesse Plemons) happens to be a white nationalist. (Also, it helps that in the review from the far-right outlet Breitbart, they characterize the president as a hero.)
Garland’s avoidance of specifics has less to do with shying away from partisanship than glossing over the difficult questions raised by a complex premise. Writers of speculative fiction live for the nitty-gritty, hammering out logistical details to bring what-ifs within our suspension of disbelief; we never find out whether Garland can back up his big-swing hypothetical, as he lacks the inclination to even try.
As he has clarified again and again to the point of insistence, his interests lie closer to journalistic matters in the abstract. “The kind of journalism we need most – reporting, which used to be the dominant form of journalism – had a deliberate removal of a certain kind of bias,” he told Polygon. “If you have a news organization which has a strong bias, it is only likely to be trusted by the choir to which it’s preaching, and it will be distrusted by the others. So that was something journalists used to actively, deliberately, consciously try to avoid. … And then the film attempts to function like those journalists.” Such a statement betrays a stunning misunderstanding of the profession’s functioning and purpose, which have always been shaped by conscious decisions of framing. Considering the material at hand, it’s hard to accept that even Garland buys his own line. Is perfect impartiality the intended takeaway when Kirsten Dunst’s battle-hardened shutterbug instructs a gunman to pose in front of his bloodied captives like they’re line-caught tuna?
Some critics have posited that however unwittingly, Garland’s methods instead pose a critique of the fourth estate’s tendency to sensationalize by doing the same; this is, at most, stumbling backwards into half an idea the film would have done well to pursue. But his total indifference to the logistics of the job – we see no editors, no note-taking, nothing less cinematic than the narrowing of eyes and clicking of a button – suggests something closer to an Occam’s razor explanation that he selected this project because it would be a good time. Directors enjoy commanding squadrons of extras in choreographed chaos, and while Garland’s clearest reference points (chief among them Saving Private Ryan’s audio-muted D-Day invasion and the society-gone-mad imagery from Apocalypse Now, the latter of which Garland perplexingly called a “dark, seductive romance” during a Q&A after New York’s press screening) are freighted with the terrible weight of history, his imaginary premise allows him to borrow the gravitas and the pulse-pounding parts of war without their attendant obligations. All the tragedy has the weightlessness of a Call of Duty video game, and Garland’s playing on easy mode.
This past weekend, the highest-budgeted production from upstart mini-major studio A24 pulled off its highest-earning opening ever, the ultimate affirmation of its director’s blockbuster instincts. Indeed, it’s hard not to think of the States-under-siege classic Independence Day when a firefight explodes the Lincoln Memorial, but Roland Emmerich – and this is the true dystopian scenario, in which we must hand it to Roland Emmerich – understood that obliterating the White House was meant to be an over-the-top popcorn thrill. With its bands of marauders, thinly drawn archetypal characters, and prevailing thirst for blood, Civil War is more like a shameless B-movie in solemn arthouse drag, in denial of a distasteful streak that could have blossomed into far more cutting commentary if properly nurtured.
Case in point: during the immersive combat set pieces touted by the ad campaign as “the stuff that IMAX was made for”, my mind drifted back to an episode of Succession wherein the morally deficient Roman brainstorms the final frontier of entertainment. “How about terror?” he spitballs. “Like, actual terror, like a VR experience, but I’m actually going to fucking die. Like war. We put you in one of those landing crafts, and you’re about to hit the beach.” To which his partner for the exercise replies, “Sure. No one’s ever gone bust overestimating the American public’s interest in violence.” In the moment, we’re meant to understand this as a crass grab for the easiest provocation available, servicing the audience’s basest desires. The concept is revolting, but at least it’s honest.
“What I noticed about these three films, specifically, is also that they’re all funny and light,” Glass said. “But inevitably, I think a lot of the discussion around it is very somber. And I think what puts a lot of people off, particularly if they’re not queer themself — people get very defensive and get this idea that it’s about ticking boxes, or some kind of ‘eat your greens’ sort of thing, which is bollocks.”
Emma Seligman, who directed “Bottoms” and wrote its screenplay alongside Sennott, had a tougher time getting the film picked up. Her critically acclaimed debut, “Shiva Baby,” was not yet in theaters when she sent around the “Bottoms” script. There were so many no’s — and then one singular yes, from Alana Mayo, another queer woman, at Orion Pictures.
Queer films “always were considered cult classics,” Seligman said, “because they weren’t marketed to a broad, mainstream audience. And so then queer people had to discover them over the years. And I think that now we’re in an era of cult classics happening immediately. Because they might not do super well at the box office, but the audience who it’s intended for will discover it immediately, simply because of social media.”
Like Seligman, Ethan Coen, soloing as a director after working for years with his brother Joel, had a hard time getting “Drive-Away Dolls” off the ground with his wife and co-writer, Tricia Cooke. They wrote the script in the early 2000s, shopped it around in 2006 or 2007, and just couldn’t get anyone interested. That changed drastically in 2022, when Focus Features was completely receptive.
“I think they’re filling a void,” Cooke said. “We’ve never had lesbian comedies, or not many. And the time was ripe.” Coen quipped, “Everybody should have their stupid movies.” And now, finally, we do.
The term “gastroporn” got thrown around a lot when The Taste of Things was in cinemas recently, but I’m not sure it’s quite right for Tran Anh Hung’s sumptuous culinary romance, seductive as all the cookery on display is. Though it has many a languid, exquisitely lit pan over the finished dishes created by Benoît Magimel’s 19th-century gourmet – including a giant, glistening vol-au-vent that I’ve been thinking about for months – it’s less about money shots than it is about foodie foreplay. The film’s greatest pleasures are in its extended sequences of preparation and process; the silently, adoringly intuitive collaboration between Magimel and Juliette Binoche’s fellow cook; the thrill of watching experts at work. OK, and there’s a near-seamless match-cut from a perfectly poached pear to Binoche reclining in the nude: not so much gastroporn as gastroerotica.
Either way, Tran’s film joins the pantheon of cinema’s great films about food, its craft and consumption, and the human relationships it helps along. The club includes Babette’s Feast, Gabriel Axel’s lovely, 1987 Oscar-winning Isak Dinesen adaptation about a French cook bringing, after years of bland compliance with the local diet, her most sensuous culinary skills to the austere-living 19th-century Protestant residents of a remote Danish island. And Like Water for Chocolate(Apple TV+), the Mexican magical-realist 90s favourite that makes most literal connections between its lovelorn protagonist’s emotions and the meals she prepares. The film seems a touch twee these days, but the food still hits. Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman (currently hard to stream, but available for those with access to Kanopy) stands as one of the great portrayals of mealtimes as a family-binding force – it’s moving and funny, but its Sunday banquets are pure sensory spectacle.
Outdoing even Lee’s film on the noodle front is Juzo Itami’s utterly wild Tampopo (Internet Archive), the so-called “ramen western” that builds a manic, genre-fusing farce in thrall to the Japanese dining staple, complete with an egg yolk-assisted sex scene that really has to be seen to be believed. Japanese food artistry gets a more disciplined celebration in the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a portrait of an octogenarian sushi master that captures the almost religious rigour of his work.
Koji Yakusho and Fukumi Kuroda in the ‘utterly wild’ Tampopo. Photograph: Allstar
It’s a welcome, humane exception in the gastro-doc genre, recently dominated either by superficial, magazine-style grazing or hectoring food-industry exposés. Others include Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy, a wonderful, spiky encounter with a British-born doyenne of Mexican cuisine that smartly nods to the tension between cultural appropriation and appreciation in the kitchen, and Les Blank’s superbly titled 80s gem Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers, a good-humoured paean to the whiffy allium that even includes Werner Herzog among its talking heads. Agnès Varda’s beloved The Gleaners and I may not be a food doc, exactly, but its nourishing study of those who forage what others throw away invites us to reconsider our own relationship to what we buy and what we eat.
‘A wonderful, spiky encounter’: Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy. Photograph: Dogwoof
Garlic’s most famous film moment, however, came in Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas, sliced paper-thin with a razor blade by a discerning gangster while in prison – all the better to melt into the sauce – and doubtless an ingredient in the hearty pasta prepared by an elderly mob mama, played by Scorsese’s own mother. The Godfather, too, includes some useful tips for making the perfect Sunday spaghetti sauce, though Italian-American cuisine got its most dedicated valentine in Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci’s Big Night, an intimately observed comedy of two squabbling fraternal restaurateurs that at one point feasts on the preparation of the baked pasta dish timpano, but finally sees the two brothers making peace over a simple omelette.
The Lunchbox (2013), starring Irrfan Khan: ‘irresistible’. Photograph: Allstar
A table laden with north African comfort food is often the centre of the drama and dialogue in Abdellatif Kechiche’s wry, rambling family drama Couscous (BFI Player), which UK distributors wisely and more appetisingly renamed from its international title, The Secret of the Grain. In the little-seen but likably sentimental South African film Barakat, a fast-breaking curry-and-rice banquet is about the only hold a widow has over her tetchy, disparate adult sons. And in irresistible Indian crowdpleaser The Lunchbox, an accidental long-distance romance is conducted via the delivery of mouthwatering packed lunches – a more protracted means of culinary courtship than the sex-on-a-plate prawn dish with which a chef seduces Tilda Swinton in Luca Guadagnino’s lush I Am Love (BFI Player), but just as effective.
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Fallen Leaves Typically doleful Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki is on his most disarming form in this autumnal oddball romance between two dejected souls – one a sandblaster, the other a supermarket stacker – who meet at a karaoke bar in a modern-day Helsinki that nonetheless feels like Kaurismäki’s own twilight world.
‘Oddball romance’: Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen in Fallen Leaves. Photograph: Sputnik
Memory In a performance far richer and more affecting than the Tammy Faye Bakker impersonation that won her an Oscar, Jessica Chastain plays a brittle, trauma-burdened single mother befriending and ultimately falling for Peter Sarsgaard’s dementia-stricken loner, in a surprisingly gentle relationship drama from Mexican provocateur Michel Franco.
Priscilla Long a fine observer of characters at once enabled and stymied by privilege, Sofia Coppola proves a perfect fit for the story of Priscilla Presley, deftly portrayed by Cailee Spaeny all the way from queasily groomed teen arm-candy to a woman reaching towards independence, with Jacob Elordi’s Elvis casting a long, unnerving shadow at all stages.
Donald Trump, impersonated by Marvel actor Sebastian Stan, will make an unlikely star attraction on the Côte d’Azur in May, as a new film about the US presidential candidate’s real-estate career is set to premiere at Cannes in May.
The lineup for the 77th edition of the film festival, unveiled at a press conference in Paris on Thursday by general delegate Thierry Frémaux and president Iris Knobloch, will also see Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone continue their prize-winning creative partnership, and British film-maker Andrea Arnold team up with Saltburn star Barry Keoghan for her first feature film in eight years.
Running in the competition are also new films by David Cronenberg, Taxi Driver scriptwriter Paul Schrader, Cannes veteran Jacques Audiard and Francis Ford Coppola’s previously announced passion project Megalopolis.
While the main programme does not quite match last year’s vintage selection for star-studdedness, it hinted at several intriguing – and often political – storylines.
In The Apprentice, Sweden-based Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi will examine Trump’s career as a real estate businessman in New York in the 1970s and 80s. Romanian-American actor Sebastian Stan, best known as Bucky Barnes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, will impersonate the orange-faced US presidential candidate, while Jeremy Strong plays Roy Cohn, the attorney who represented Trump in the 1970s.
Running outside the competition, meanwhile, Canadian arthouse favourite Guy Maddin’s new film Rumours will see Cate Blanchett play an Ursula von der Leyen-esque politician at a fictional G7 meeting.
Running in the competition, Greek director Lanthimos’s anthology film Kinds of Kindness, which again features Willem Dafoe, comes just two months after his last film Poor Things’ glory at the Oscars, and less than a year after scooping the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival.
Dartford-born Arnold (Red Road, Fish Tank, Cow) will not only receive the Golden Coach award at the festival but also show her new feature, Bird, her first since 2016’s American Honey. Frémaux described it as a coming-of-age story about a young girl trying to escape from the narrow confines of the neighbourhood she grew up in.
Escape … Nykiya Adams in Bird, the new feature directed by Andrea Arnold.
Ben Whishaw plays Russian poet and political dissident Eduard Limonov in director Khiril Sebrennikov’s Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie, an adaptation of the feted novel by French writer Emmanuel Carrère.
Paolo Sorrentino, the Italian director of The Hand of God and The Young Pope, returns to Cannes with Parthenope, another film set in his native Napoli, while 2015 Palme d’Or winner Jacques Audiard will premiere Emilia Perez, a musical set in the world of Mexican drug cartels.
The festival’s jury will be chaired by Barbie director Greta Gerwig, the first female film-maker in the role since Jane Campion in 2014.
Films already announced include George Miller’s Mad Max prequel Furiosa, Kevin Costner’s multi-episode Western Horizon: An American Saga and Coppola’s long-awaited Megalopolis. Supposedly inspired by the Roman empire, the film has been four decades in the making and was reported to have been funded with $120m of the Godfather director’s own money.
The opening film will be absurdist comedy The Second Act starring Léa Seydoux and directed by French director Quentin Dupieux, once upon a time better known under his musical alias Mr Oizo. As tradition has it, the opening film will debut in French cinemas the same day.
Star Warscreator George Lucas will receive an honorary Palme d’Or at the closing ceremony on 25 May.
A spectacularly strong lineup for the festival in 2023 saw Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall claim the Palme d’Or and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest awarded the Grand Prix. The two films became juggernauts of the awards season, with Glazer’s stylised Holocaust drama winning two Oscars in March.
An earthquake and an eclipse weren’t the only natural rarities that happened in New York City this past week. Did you hear about the sasquatch in Central Park? The makers of “Sasquatch Sunset” sure hope you did.
That’s because the sasquatch was a costume and his stroll through the park was a publicity push for the new film from the brothers David and Nathan Zellner. Opening in New York on Friday, the movie spends a year in the wild with a sasquatch pack — a male and female (Nathan Zellner and Riley Keough) and two younger sasquatches (Jesse Eisenberg and Christophe Zajac-Denek) — as they eat, have sex, fight predators and reckon with death.
Droll but big-hearted, the movie sits at the intersection of the ad campaign for Jack Link’s beef jerky, the 1987 comedy “Harry and the Hendersons” and a 1970s nature documentary, down to the hippie-vibe soundtrack.
What goes into a movie about Bigfoots? (Bigfeet?) Even after a day of following the costumed sasquatch around Central Park, we had questions for the cast and crew. They had answers, which have been edited and condensed.
What inspired the film?
DAVID ZELLNER We’ve been obsessed with Bigfoot since we were kids. It was such a fixture in ’70s pop culture. Any kind of ape-themed movie we loved, starting from the “2001” Dawn of Man sequence to the early “Planet of the Apes” movies. In the age of the internet, more footage came online of sightings, but it was always bigfoot strolling along in the woods. Why is the only footage of bigfoot the same thing? We wanted to see the full spectrum of its existence.
What drew the actors?
JESSE EISENBERG It’s told with an earnestness, not a hipster flippancy. It had two things you don’t find frequently: It was so unusual and so good. Reading it, I was just weeping with the characters, hysterically laughing. It felt like the full breadth of human experience but through the vehicle of these creatures.
RILEY KEOUGH I thought it was beautiful and hilarious and absurd and touching and crazy, all the things I love in a movie.
How did the actors prepare?
EISENBERG We looked at videos of apes and the Patterson-Gimlin footage, that famous shot of the sasquatch walking with his back to camera. I worked with this movement coach, Lorin Eric Salm, who studied under Marcel Marceau, and he created with us vocabulary and a style of movement. We had different grunts and calls for different reasons, a high-pitched echolalic thing when we looked for other sasquatches, and guttural sounds.
DAVID ZELLNER Every single thing these creatures do is stuff everyone has seen their dog or cat do. But when you have creatures with humanlike qualities doing it, it suddenly becomes uncomfortable.
What were the costumes made of?
STEVE NEWBURN, creature designer As a fan of “Harry and the Hendersons,” I had an idea of my ideal sasquatch design, which happened to be very close to what David and Nathan were thinking. We did full body casts. Everything was sculpted in clay first. The material for the costumes was a foam latex. It weighed, top to bottom, six or seven pounds. We put climbing boots on their feet and built around that to accommodate the terrain. The hair is a combination of synthetic hair and yak hair, and the face hair is human, custom knotted in the same way you’d build a wig.
Were the costumes and makeup hard to adjust to?
NEWBURN Usually when you do this work, the first direction is, please be careful with it. We did the opposite: roll around in those thorn bushes and jump in that river. I liked that they looked like wet dogs, vs. it looks like they came out of a salon.
KEOUGH I found that if I put diaper cream under the prosthetics that it would come off better. At the end of the night I would remove my own prosthetics, which was fun. When you wear that thing all day, you can’t wait to rip it off.
What’s the difference between directing sasquatch characters and human characters?
NATHAN ZELLNER When the actors put on the costumes, feeling the fur and being out in the wilderness with no sets and walking over logs: that really helped. Once all that was figured out really quickly, directing them wasn’t like, you need to move like this, it was more like normal directing.
DAVID ZELLNER It reminded us of silent film acting, in terms of how much information you can convey through the eyes. In a lot of creature work, actors will have contacts or have VFX eyes. But we wanted the rawness of their actual eyes, like in Buster Keaton’s films, how much he expressed with just the subtlest glance, or in “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” how much she conveyed, looking into her eyes.
Is it a family-friendly movie?
KEOUGH It depends on the family. [Laughs] I think the audience is everybody. It might be scary for small children.
DAVID ZELLNER It’s rated R for nudity, which is the funniest thing.
[The following interview was conducted for the Forum section of the Berlinale, where the filmmaker’s second feature Kottukkaali had its world premiere in February 2024.]
Berlinale Forum: As far as I know, the starting point for your film was an incident in your own family. Could you speak a bit about how you developed this into a script and a film?
PS Vinothraj: Yes, such occurrences were very common in my childhood, and I just internalized them growing up: “that’s how things are.” But once I became a filmmaker, there was another event in our extended family. That’s when I started exploring this idea, of how these foolish beliefs are fed into people when growing up. Doing so, I realized that it’s not an isolated incident in one village in the south of India. Rather, it happens all across the country. And women are usually the centre of such rituals and practices. This is when I felt it deserved to be made into a film.
Even as we speak, people are either making plans to visit seers for this ritual of exorcism, or they’re on their way back. It’s happening every minute.
The protagonist Meena is silent for most of the film. How did that develop?
In situations such as these in real life, the girl is usually silent and hardly allowed to express herself. It’s everyone around the girl who constantly speaks about her. And this is one of the reasons why I tried to portray Meena as a silent character. But I also think silence can convey adamance, more than overt arguments or fights. Meena has made up her mind, and no matter what the people around her do or say, she is steadfast in her thoughts and desires. I wanted to visually convey her grit and resolve, and that’s why I wrote her that way. Her silence is a defiant, adamant kind of silence.
We were wondering if the English title The Adamant Girl is the literal translation of Kottukkaali, or there’s some other meaning to the word.
In Southern Tamil Nadu, the word ‘kottukkaali’ is a dismissive term used to describe women, young and old, who do or say what they want. It’s very much related to the sense of an adamant girl.
Speaking about the form of the film, our selection committee liked that it is a road movie, and that you don’t exploit the more melodramatic aspects of it. How did you make this decision?
The intention was to closely follow people who have a certain belief system. And the goal was not to demonize or falsify them. The violence that they cause is an unwitting, innocent kind of violence. And the idea was to follow the characters in their world and observe their behaviour and beliefs, before finally arriving at a statement. That’s what led to the form of the film, which basically follows the characters in their everyday behaviour, speech and rituals.
He’s back. But he never went away. Patricia Highsmith’s diabolically inspired postwar creation Tom Ripley has returned, to luxuriate in our 21st-century age of Instagram lifestyle envy, tacit class paranoia and online identity fraud. He has triumphantly resurfaced in Steven Zaillian’s sumptuous and instantly addictive new eight-episode adaptation of Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr Ripley for Netflix, starring the incomparable Andrew Scott as the charmer, aesthete and serial killer. It’s a seven-star luxury hotel of a TV show in arthouse black-and-white, which my colleague Lucy Mangan has hailed as quite possibly definitive.
It’s set in the early 60s, but has a queasy resonance for 2024. At an unhurried tempo, Scott’s Ripley is shown surmounting his early unease and likable callow vulnerability, attaining a hypnotic and insidious poise, his irises seeming to merge blackly with his pupils. He even to me seems to sway slightly, like a cobra in the presence of a hamster. Ripley is seen at first in flophouse poverty in New York running petty scams with stolen cheques; he is then approached via a private detective by troubled wealthy plutocrat Herbert Greenleaf (played by Kenneth Lonergan), because Ripley once had a passing acquaintance with this man’s wastrel son Dickie Greenleaf, played by Johnny Flynn. Greenleaf Sr offers Ripley large sums of money to travel to Italy, where Dickie is lounging about with his girlfriend Marge (Dakota Fanning), and persuade Dickie to come home. Instead, Ripley befriends Dickie, deploying his gift for mimicry and flattery, a parasitic conquest that leads to obsession and murder.
Extravagantly malign … Dougray Scott (left) and John Malkovich in Ripley’s Game. Photograph: Fine Line/Allstar
Scott gives a much more downbeat, more realist account of the antihero, or pro-villain Ripley, a contrast to the readably wicked Moriarty that appeared opposite Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock. In Anthony Minghella’s 2000 movie version, Matt Damon played Ripley with a nerdier, needier and more beta-male vibe which at first amuses Jude Law’s Dickie Greenleaf. Scott’s Ripley is closer to Alain Delon’s portrayal in René Clément’s 1960 version Purple Noon, in that Scott’s Ripley cultivates a blankness, an unsettling gift for inscrutable reserve: the sociopath’s resting face. And yet Zaillian’s adaptation gives us much more of Ripley’s essential loneliness and miserable vulnerability. He doesn’t, it seems to me, show us the more worldly and more extravagantly malign figure of Highsmith’s later novel Ripley’s Game, incarnated by Dennis Hopper in Wim Wenders’ 1977 film The American Friend and by John Malkovich in Liliane Cavani’s Ripley’s Game from 2002.
Why is Ripley so fascinating? Partly because there is something so timelessly disturbing about his modus operandi: the perversion of friendship. We might think that to befriend someone, or to be befriended, is a universal good. Aren’t strangers, after all, just friends we haven’t met yet? And yet you can never really know what is happening inside someone else’s head; not even your best friend or lover or spouse, especially someone you met in later life. Who knows what ulterior motives exist in friendship, what gratification of vested interests, or how friendship can for years coexist with rivalry and even dislike? “Frenemy” is word that dates back to Ripley’s birth but has become common currency in recent times.
Matt Damon and Jude Law in 1999’s The Talented Mr Ripley. Photograph: Collection Christophel/Alamy
Ripley’s relationship with Dickie has a long pedigree; it’s the relationship of Mr Hyde with Dr Jekyll, or Dorian Gray with Lord Henry Wotton, or Dirk Bogarde’s creepy valet with James Fox’s indolent man-about-town in Joseph Losey’s movie The Servant. And there is no need of any overtly contemporary interpretation to find that queer dimension: Emerald Fennell’s divisive psycho-thriller satire Saltburn was about an oikish upstart at Oxford conceiving an obsessive love for a beautiful young male aristocrat and being deliriously but secretly overexcited to be invited to this young exquisite’s stately home for the summer.
This kid starts out as Evelyn Waugh’s Charles Ryder but he winds up as Highsmith’s Ripley. This was the allusion that triggered so many of the film’s detractors: the neglected and overlooked class element of Ripley-ism. Ripley speaks to the ruling class distaste for counter-jumpers and presumptuous parvenus. But his existence infuriates those who resent the ironic implication that pleading on behalf of the poor is just the politics of envy. These people aren’t poor, is the perceived sneery insinuation … they’re just pretending, and worse still, they’re like Ripley, part of the vast and spongiform middle class who can code-switch to posh or street when they want. They’re malign and invasive, they want to take the rich people’s cake and eat it.
Timelessly disturbing … Dennis Hopper as Tom Ripley in The American Friend. Photograph: Road Movies Filmprod./Allstar
Paradoxically, Ripley is an adventurer for the new digital age. Each time I revisit Ripley, I’m struck by how we need that original setting because his criminal impostures wouldn’t really work in an era of smartphones and Google searches. And yet he’s a narcissist fit for the new world of social media. Posting and boasting, taking carefully edited and filtered pictures of our wonderful lives and lovely holidays with witty descriptions and humblebrags, compulsively advertising our specialness. I can well imagine a version of Ripley in which he is always on Instagram, stalking Dickie’s feed, posting his own delusional version in New York, using sock-puppet Instagram and X personae to pursue his creepy scam side-hustles – and finally catching up with Dickie in Italy, killing him and taking over his account with new geolocated pictures to create the illusion that he’s still alive.
Felicity Morris’s documentary The Tinder Swindler was about a conman who uses dating sites to siphon money out of his date-victims; it’s about the chilling nexus between sociopathy, greed, emotional manipulation and the opportunities offered by social media for imposture. Tom Ripley is the ancestor of it all. Scott’s seductive performance as the Napoleon of emotional crime delivers all of it and more. If only it wasn’t quite so enjoyable.
When George Takei talks about his childhood, he speaks of both anguish and beauty.
The actor best known as Sulu from “Star Trek” was only 5 when he and his family — like thousands of Japanese American citizens during World War II — were relocated from their Los Angeles home to a string of incarceration camps.
Takei captured some of his family’s wartime experiences — in a horse stall in Arcadia, Calif., a camp in Rohwer, Ark., another one in Northern California — in his picture book, “My Lost Freedom,” due out April 16. “This is an American story that Americans need to know about,” he said in a video call.
The book continues his mission to shed light on a dark chapter in U.S. history. It follows his 1994 autobiography “To the Stars,” his 2019 graphic memoir “They Called Us Enemy” and the 2015 musical production “Allegiance,” which was inspired by his life.
Takei, 86, discussed meeting dignitaries with his husband, Brad, as well as the keepsakes he treasures and his one healthy addiction. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
1
Seeing Your Work in Lights
I got a phone call that the marquee for “Allegiance” was going up at 8 a.m. Our apartment was so close to Longacre Theater, in Manhattan, we ran down there to see the letters being put there. It was thrilling — a life landmark experience! I wished both my parents could be there.
2
Big Band
At Rohwer, my father arranged to borrow a record player from the camp administration every couple of months, and after dinner, the tables were dragged away, the benches were put off to the side, and the teenagers got to have a dance. My bedtime music was the music from the mess hall. I still get a lump in my throat when I hear big band music from the 1940s.
3
Mount Fuji
My parents loved sending me to summer school. There was a session in Tokyo at Sophia University. I think I was 17. One of the guys came up with this idea: “They allow people to climb up to the top of Mount Fuji. Would you guys want to do that?” About a dozen of us said, yeah. When you begin, they sell you this staff. At each station they have an old man with a branding iron who’ll mark the staff; that’s proof that you reached the station. I have the whole staff with the final branding.
4
Dining With Presidents
Brad and I are a gay couple, I was raised in American prison camps, and we went to a State Dinner, in the White House, as guests of President Clinton in 1999 to welcome Prime Minister Obuchi to Washington. And I got another invitation from President Obama to greet Prime Minister Abe and his wife in 2015. Obama put us up on the dais, I was seated next to the first lady of Japan, and Brad was seated next to Nancy Pelosi. How about that?
5
Sydney Opera House
A couple of years ago, we were in Australia, and Brad was dealing with jet lag by going to bed. My attitude is, you’ve got to walk around and get the blood coursing, and a sense of the place where you are. I was walking along, and there was this street lamp advertising “The Phantom of the Opera” at Sydney Opera House. So I rushed back to the hotel, woke Brad up and said, “We’re going to go to the theater!” It was a fantastic production.
6
Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles
It’s one of the premier institutions in America — the place for anyone doing any kind of research on that chapter of American history. I’m a former chairman of the board, I’m still on the board of trustees, and I founded that museum with others.
7
Shellfish in Australia
For “Blood Oath,” we filmed right near Moreton Bay. They have these crustaceans that look like bugs, a midsize crab with a thousand tiny legs. They said this was a unique dish to Queensland. It’s a combination of the consistency of oysters and the flavor of lobster and shrimp. You have to taste it to know what it’s really like. It’s so indescribably good.
8
Olympic Torch
In 1984, the idea was having runners carry the Olympic flame every five kilometers all the way to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. “Star Trek” producer Harve Bennett said, “Well, George, you’re a runner. Paramount would love to sponsor you.” It was the most heady run, and I got to keep the uniform and the torch.
9
Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles
When we came out of camp in 1946, the whole world opened up, and the Chinese theater was a glamorous place for me. You’ll find my name, together with my “Star Trek” colleagues, right there on that sidewalk.
10
Green Tea
I carry Ito En Oi Ocha tea bags around. They have lots of antioxidants that help you live long and prosper! I drink it every day, all day. I am an addict.
It’s 10am on the morning of the Oscars, and Percival Everett is nowhere to be seen. We’re supposed to be meeting at his neighbourhood coffee shop in leafy South Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles, before he makes his way across the city for the ceremony, which begins its long march towards best picture just after lunch.
American Fiction, the film of his novel Erasure, is nominated for best adapted screenplay, up against Barbie, but tipped to win. The hour went forward last night, but surely he knows that? At 10.25am I WhatsApp him, but the message remains unread. Eventually I call. “Yes, this is Percival Everett. We’re meeting in half an hour?” The clocks, Percival, the clocks. “Ah,” he chuckles, “my fault.” He’s there in a couple of minutes, in khaki pants, grey shirt and a baseball cap, looking as if he has nothing much on today – a man not only in his own world, but his own time. When I ask why his phone didn’t update like they all do now, he says he never looks at it, and raises his wrist to flaunt a distinctively analogue watch. Hasn’t he got quite an important date later? “Oh,” he shrugs, “my wife would’ve made sure I got there on time.” That’s the novelist Danzy Senna, with whom he has two sons, aged 17 and 15.
Despite having lived in LA for more than three decades, Everett, 67, who teaches literature at the University of Southern California, doesn’t see being invited to the Oscars as somehow getting the keys to the city. It’s more like “visiting someone’s garden shed”, he says, a little bizarrely. “I’ll feel ‘Oh that’s a nice lawnmower’ and never go back.” I suggest that’s quite a prosaic image for what lots of people consider to be the most glamorous event in the universe. “I guess that betrays my feelings about glamour.”
Not that he’s ostentatiously professorial, his otherwordliness just a different way of showing off. He genuinely doesn’t seem to care: about the red carpet, accolades, critics. “I don’t go online,” he tells me. No social media? No, and no reviews. Is he not curious to see how others interpret his work? “Oh I do read scholarship – I think I learn stuff from that – but reviews I just never have any interest in.” Is it a case of protecting himself from comments that might sow doubt, or sting? “In fact, I might be interested in a really scathing review.” Why? “It might be fun? That’s gonna be kind of crazy, to be upset about a bad review. Like, what else can you expect in the world? Not everybody is gonna like my shirt.”
Acclaim isn’t a big motivator, then – instead he writes when he gets fascinated by something, which has happened often enough to produce 24 dazzlingly different novels, stories of baseball players, ranchers, mathematicians, cops and philosophising babies. And, despite his output, he finds time for plenty of other interests. Painting is the big one, and we stroll the short distance from the cafe to his studio, a windowless room in a basement complex bedecked with frenetic, abstract canvases, half-squeezed tubes of paint and impasto-slathered palettes. He’s also a skilled woodworker (he recently became obsessed with buying and repairing old mandolins), a jazz musician, and a horse and mule trainer. (Everett once told Bookforum that when he was being hired by USC a member of the faculty saw his name and exclaimed: “The last thing we need is another 50-year-old Brit,” only to be told by the receptionist that the newest professor was in fact a “black cowboy”).
Sterling K Brown, Jeffrey Wright, Erika Alexander in American Fiction. Photograph: MGM/Everett/Shutterstock
Horses are no longer a part of his life – he combined working on ranches with teaching much earlier in his career – but they taught him some transferable skills. “I don’t get stressed out,” he tells me. “I think that’s from being on horses. You can’t calm down a 1,200-pound animal by getting excited.” That’s handy, because others in his position might be getting a little wound up by their work being judged in the most public way possible in just a few hours time. It’s a big day, no? “I mean, sort of. It’s not my film,” he laughs. “So, I’m excited for the director.”
He means Cord Jefferson, the former journalist who also adapted the novel, and who described showing Everett the movie as “the most frightening screening I did”. The plot differences are relatively minor, though Erasure is more complex, less certain in its conclusions. Both works tell the story of Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, a writer of abstruse fiction who fumes when he finds his retelling of Aeschylus’s The Persians filed under “African American studies” in a bookstore (“The only thing ostensibly African American [about it] was my jacket photograph”). But his commercial fortunes are transformed when he decides to submit a “ghetto” novel, ramping up the stereotypes to an obscene degree that white liberal editors nevertheless find irresistible.
Everett has spoken in the past with frustration about Erasure looming so large in his body of work. Does he still feel that way? “The only thing that ever pissed me off is that everyone agreed with it. No one took issue, or said: ‘It’s not like that.’” Why was that annoying? “I like the blowback. It’s interesting. There’s nothing worse than preaching to the choir, right?” Erasure came out in 2001, but people have taken American Fiction as a satire of modern publishing. Are the double standards he satirised still as pervasive? “There is a much greater range of work [now], and that was what I was addressing. So in some ways, there’s been a lot of change. The problem I had wasn’t with particular works, just with the fact that those were the only ones available.”
On the other hand, the thinking that led to that narrow range still very much exists. “For example, I have a friend, a director, who had some success with a film. And the next call he got was someone wanting him to direct a biopic of George Floyd. Why? Because he’s black.” That could be very irritating, of course. But it could also be a dream project. “Well,” Everett considers the point. “It’s like you’re at the office and they say: ‘We need a black person.’ Why? ‘Well, we need diversity in this room, so would you come in here?’ That’s not why you want to be invited.”
In any case, he isn’t feeling proprietorial about American Fiction: “I view it as a different work,” he tells me, though I get the impression he’s making a statement of artistic fact, rather than attempting to distance himself from the production. “I appreciate it as a different work. In spirit it’s much like the novel, but being a film, it’s not as dark.” It could have been worse: he entirely disowned the TV movie of his second book, Walk Me to the Distance. “I never saw it. I read the script, and I didn’t like it. The changes that they made were so grotesque, there was no way to embrace that at all.”
Regardless, more Everett will be coming soon to a screen near you. In 2022 he published The Trees, a genre-busting comedy about lynching, if you can imagine such a thing – part police procedural, part zombie-horror, part solemn testament to the victims of racial murder. It has been optioned for a possible “limited series” and “people are working on it” but he can’t say any more. While not surprising (the novel was shortlisted for the Booker), it will be interesting to see how a big entertainment company deals with the taboo imagery and extensive gore – “Yeah, well that’s their problem!” he laughs.
His new novel, James, is at least as likely to pique the interest of producers – partly because it adapts a cornerstone of American culture, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. While I’m teasing him about his lack of interest in Hollywood glitz, I ask if there are any writers he would be starstruck by. “[All] dead,” he replies – but offers up Samuel Butler, Chester Himes and, of course, Mark Twain. What would they talk about in any ethereal meeting? “You know, I’ve thought about that,” he says. “I don’t know if we would say much. We’d probably just talk about the landscape or something. I’d just kind of like to hear what he sees.”
In the meantime, Everett has taken the initiative with Twain’s most famous text, which tells the story of 13-year-old Huck as he navigates the Mississippi River accompanied by an enslaved man, Jim. “It’s kind of a cliche to say how important it is to American letters. It’s the first time that a novel tried to deal with the very centre of the American psyche – and that is race.” There were protest novels about slavery before then, he says, but they were narrower, focused on the institution itself. “Huck Finn, picaresque adventures aside, is really about a young American, representing America, trying to navigate this landscape, and understand how someone – his friend, actually the only father figure in the book – is also property.”
“He’s got this moral conundrum: ‘He belongs to someone and I’m doing something illegal by helping him run, but he’s my friend and a person, and he shouldn’t be a slave.’ There’s nothing more American.” Whereas Twain’s focus is tightly on Huck’s moral universe, Everett tells the other half of the story, making Jim the narrator, restoring his full name, James, and turning him into an erudite intellectual. Characteristically, one of the major plot devices is linguistic. The hokey dialect that, in Twain, renders Jim rustic and unthreatening, is revealed as a feint – a survival mechanism that the slaves use to disguise their real capacities in front of white people. One evening, James sits down in his cabin to teach some of the enslaved children a language lesson. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” he explains, the children chanting: “The better they feel, the safer we are.” He asks a little girl to translate, and is reassured when she produces a sentence in amped-up vernacular: “Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.”
Everett’s novels make abundant use of language games, conceits and disquisitions. Erasure contains a passage from Monk’s inpenetrable post-structuralist novel, and snippets of conversations between Wittgenstein and Derrida. This could be off-putting were it not for the fact that they’re often spliced with much more conventional, pacey writing, and many darkly hilarious moments – 2022’s Dr No, for example, mixes head-scratching maths with a lot of wild, Bond-inspired action. James, likewise, combines dreamed visitations from Voltaire and Locke with page-turning jeopardy. Is that kind of juxtaposition a tactic on Everett’s part, a way of licensing the intellectual gymnastics? “I don’t know if I think about it a lot. I think that any kind of intellectual understanding of the world is generated by a physical location in the world.” And by stuff happening? “Yes, by stuff happening.
It’s why I like teaching – because I get to go out into the world and be reminded that there are other people thinking different thoughts. My inclination is to stay at home and never leave. What would I write if I did that?”
Leave he does, though, and one of his more important outposts is an office in the humanities building of the University of Southern California. Unusually for LA, it’s an easy trip by metro from South Pasadena, which is why a lot of professors choose to live there. The day after the Academy Awards, the campus is glorious, its terracotta tiles and pink-brick modernist halls warming in the sun. Everett is running late, but only by a few minutes. He catches me in the lobby and we walk upstairs to a room with a view of the skyscrapers of downtown and, in the distance, the San Gabriel Mountains. American Fiction won its Oscar, and I ask if he got into the spirit of things. “Oh, that was fine. We had fun going, but we don’t need to go to that again.” No parties, then? “We went to the so-called Governors ball, which is in the ballroom right after the event. We could take it for about 10 minutes and we found a way out.”
If Everett sounds ungrateful, or grumpy, he’s not – though he’s in a little pain because of a bad back. No, he’s quick to smile, generous with his time, and simply “not the most extroverted person in the world”. He suspects that, like several of his characters, he’s “on the spectrum”. Today, we’re surrounded by another typically Everettian assortment – a framed photograph of a beloved mule, lots of books and some awards, including one from the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. “Oxymoronic” he jokes, before explaining that, though he grew up in South Carolina, he was born in the neighbouring state. He got out of the south quickly, moving west after his undergraduate degree. “I don’t want to return and live in the south,” he told one interviewer. “I want to see the sun set on the ocean.” But when I suggest he’s no fan of that part of the world, he demurs. “That’s a little unfair. The American inclination is to find a region and blame it so it doesn’t have to feel bad as a whole. There are lots of good people there, and lots of people I’d rather not spend time with. But that’s true of everywhere.”
My attention is drawn to what looks like an elaborate sewing box. “Oh, it’s a fly tying kit.” Is fishing another one of his things? “Yes.” So you make the flies yourself? “Usually while I’m talking to students.” I find it interesting that he likes to distract part of his brain from the task at hand, and it turns out to be something of a theme. James, he says, was written “on the coffee table with Mission: Impossible going the entire time”. What? “Some network would just play the same episodes over and over. It’s just white noise for me.” We’re talking the original 1960s series, by the way, not the movie. “I don’t remember them from being a kid,” he says, and then, for perhaps the first time, becomes really animated: “but the bongo part of the song is fantastic. And that’s really what got me watching. It’s an OK song but the bongo part of it, the percussive part, is incredible – the counting of it. It’s just completely mesmerising.” I’m amazed he can concentrate, but he says: “I don’t really watch. I just know what’s there. And I look up, and my game would be how quickly could I identify the episode. Just from a shot of a hand or anything.” In fact, it makes the writing easier: “It’s a distraction that allows my mind to run instead of trying to … to figure out the story.”
It remains to be seen whether critics will pick up on any subliminally incorporated plotlines from Mission: Impossible in the new book. The reviews for James, published in the US a few weeks ago, are beginning to trickle in. I mention that the Washington Post seemed to like it. “They also told me there was a New York Times review today,” Everett says, without affect. It’s only afterwards that I take a look: it’s a spectacular rave.
We return, briefly, to that Oscar. “Awards are what they are. They don’t make anything better” – unlike bongos, clearly. Being unimpressed by the event is one thing, but this is going to have a concrete effect on his life. The tour he’s about to embark on – “against my better judgment, 12 cities in 13 days” – will doubtless be sold out. There will be more interest in his work, more sales, more scrutiny. And Erasure will potentially define him far more than it did before. Does he worry, given the sheer variety of his writing, about the gravitational pull of that “African American studies” bookshelf – of, ironically, being reduced to the stereotype of “race writer”? “When people come to the work, they get what the work offers. And however you get them there, it’s OK. I don’t much worry about that. If people read anything, I’m happy. It doesn’t even have to be my work. Because if they just become readers, that’s a much better culture.”
“What is it Walt Whitman says in By Blue Ontario’s Shore?” he continues. “I’m paraphrasing, but since it’s Whitman, it doesn’t matter: if you want a better society, produce better people.” (The phrase in the poem is “Produce great Persons, the rest follows.”)
So how do you produce better people? “By helping make them smarter. Education, so they’re interested in ideas. It’d be great if somehow literary fiction could affect popular culture.” But isn’t that precisely what Erasure has done, via American Fiction? “A little bit,” he concedes. “We’ll see”. And with a bemused and friendly laugh, he’s ready to turn his attention to the next thing.
A minor picture with curiosity value: Charlie Chaplin’s final film as a director, starring Brando and Sophia Loren, a comedy in the style of the Hollywood Golden Age, based on the tall tales of a real-life Russian singer and in fact originally conceived by Chaplin in the 30s for Paulette Goddard. Brando plays an American diplomat who is astonished to find that the Russian countess (Loren) he was charmed by in Hong Kong has stowed away in his cabin on the voyage home. Brando does his best and this method legend was sufficiently in awe of Chaplin to submit to his old-fashioned way of working: acting out for Brando the required line-readings and movements. (Oh, to have had fly-on-the-wall location footage of these moments.) Certainly, Brando would never again be so submissive with a director.
Brando and Matthew Broderick in The Freshman. Photograph: Tristar/Allstar
19. The Freshman (1990)
As The Godfather becomes ever more important in film history, so there may be a kind of gathering tacit consensus among cinephiles that this should be tactfully overlooked or just forgotten about: a film in which Brando risked devaluing his brand by actually spoofing the Vito Corleone persona. He plays shady New York businessman Carmine Sabatini, who astounds fresh-faced film student Matthew Broderick with his resemblance to the legendary Don Corleone, with Brando doing all the wheezing, grandfatherly, adenoidal mannerisms. Sabatini gives Broderick’s character a job as a delivery boy, which may be a subtle reference to Apocalypse Now. A sprightly, watchable movie.
18. Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)
This Technicolor seafaring spectacular had Brando aboard the HMS Bounty playing high-minded naval officer Fletcher Christian, who will no longer tolerate the arrogance and cruelty of Captain William Bligh, a role fiercely and theatrically dispatched by Trevor Howard. It is an intriguing faceoff, and a big Hollywood stage for Brando to grandstand. It is always interesting to hear Brando doing a stagey Britspeak accent, but this is a clenched and formal role for him.
17. Viva Zapata! (1952)
Brando and Jean Peters in Elia Kazan’s Viva Zapata! Photograph: Cine Text / Allstar/Sportsphoto Ltd. / Allstar
With Eli Kazan directing, John Steinbeck writing and Brando in the lead role, the ingredients should surely have been in place for something great, yet the film about the great Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata falls a little short of that. It is something to do with the dodgy blackface Mexican makeup and the droopy moustache, which was considered unconvincing at the time and more objectionable as the years have gone by, especially as Brando was always such an outspoken campaigner for civil rights and anti-racism. Brando’s Zapata begins the action as a simple, wide-eyed peasant and quickly becomes a natural leader: the role showcases Brando’s gift for hauteur and rebellious contempt for authority.
16. The Missouri Breaks (1976)
Moviegoers were longing for a Marlon Brando/Jack Nicholson pairing; they finally got it in this revisionist 70s western from director Arthur Penn. If the result wasn’t quite the combustible mix they were expecting, perhaps it’s because there’s only room for one smouldering legend on screen at once, and Nicholson was reportedly intimidated by Brando. Nicholson is Tom Logan, a cattle rustler, and Brando is the coolly intimidating “regulator” or mercenary bandit, hired by a land baron to drive away rustlers or kill them. Perhaps the role itself meant that Brando was going to steal the scene, especially with his juicy Irish accent. But the movie doesn’t come properly to life.
Brando in The Men. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
15. The Men (1950)
Brando’s screen debut was in this robustly made, heartfelt and well-meant issue movie from screenwriter Carl Foreman and director Fred Zinnemann. Brando plays a US soldier severely injured in the second world war and confined to using a wheelchair, coming to terms with his situation in the Veterans Administration hospital and having painful scenes with his fiancee who is now frightened of him; he suspects she now wants out of the marriage and perhaps, in his angry and confused heart, he can’t blame her. The pure nobility and handsomeness of Brando’s face and head was perhaps never more clearly showcased than in this early picture, and it shows us a distinct part of Brando’s screen acting style; that sense of bottled-up anger against some restriction or injustice that he can’t or won’t clearly describe.
14. Burn! (1969)
A complicated, richly detailed role for Brando, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo (immediately after his Battle of Algiers) and a film to set alongside Viva Zapata! or Mutiny on the Bounty – only this time Brando is on the side of the rebels in the most duplicitous way. He plays Sir William Walker, a British adventurer and mercenary (in fact based on an American historical figure), tasked by the 19th-century British government with fomenting a slave uprising in a Portuguese colony in the Caribbean so that the resulting indigenous government will be a puppet state run by British commercial interests. Brando’s Walker is arrogant, cynical, worldly and cunning – another example of Brando’s stagey but serviceable British accent transforming his whole being from lithe American into haughty and very English-patrician-looking performer.
With Anna Magnani in The Fugitive Kind. Photograph: RONALD GRANT
13. The Fugitive Kind (1960)
Brando’s association with Tennessee Williams in A Streetcar Named Desire has become legendary and it confers some interest in Brando’s later Williams film, in which he plays a familiar role in a steamy drama directed by Sidney Lumet, co-written by Williams adapting his play Orpheus Descending. Brando is the sexy, earthy, guitar-playing drifter Snakeskin who blows into a small town, evidently wanted by the cops back in New Orleans. Many of the drunk or bored women around the place are interested in Snakeskin, but he seems to have feelings for the unhappily married woman running the local store, played by no less a movie figure than Anna Magnani. She is someone he can open up to about his feelings and his inner life, and in this movie we see the plaintive, almost martyred Brando expression, his eyes repeatedly turned upwards as he speaks like a secular saint.
12. Sayonara (1957)
Self-conscious it may be, but this handsomely produced romantic drama of the postwar years, based on the chunky bestseller by James A Michener, deals earnestly and forthrightly with the subject of racism. Brando’s fighter pilot Ace, based in Japan, starts out with the usual bigoted attitudes, and entirely in agreement with the US army’s rules against interracial relationships. But then he falls deeply in love with elegant Japanese singer Hana-ogi, played by Japanese-American performer Miiko Taka. Today, the movie might be vulnerable to charges of orientalism and exoticism, but ittoughly sticks to its conviction that the union of a white American man and a Japanese woman can and will work out. The title means saying “goodbye” to racist attitudes.
11. Superman (1978) + Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (2006)
Brando got a huge fee for a small cameo in the 1978 Superman movie starring Christopher Reeve, which laid the groundwork for superhero movies becoming the westerns of the 21st century – and perhaps also laid the groundwork for Brando’s own cynical and rather boorish disenchantment with movie-making generally. Certainly Reeve made no secret of his dismay and disillusion at Brando’s shrugging and negligent attitude. Brando played Superman’s snowy-haired father Jor-El on the doomed planet Krypton in both the first film and the sequel as directed by Richard Donner, but when Donner was fired from Superman II, which was almost entirely reshot by replacement Richard Lester, Brando’s excised contribution only surfaced when the Donner cut was released in 2006. Perhaps Brando would have raised his game if he had been cast as Lex Luthor, the part that went to Gene Hackman.
This is the great Brando icon-cameo, the movie in which his small, incomparably potent contribution makes sense because of the fugitive legend nature of the part –rather like Orson Welles in The Third Man. He plays Col Kurtz, the brilliant and once exemplary US army officer who must be tracked down during the Vietnam war, having gone mad in the Cambodian jungle and established his own cult where he is worshipped as a pagan god. Brando’s head looms out of the darkness like an angry planet or a giant carved fetish; just his face, and those staring eyes, are enough to compel (and scare) the viewer. His scenes above ground, which surfaced with the newer director’s cuts successively licensed by Francis Ford Coppola, are, in their way, just as unsettling, and the breathy, semi-strangulated Brando voice is like a sinister message from the bowels of the earth.
9. The Chase (1966)
Brando got the above-the-title billing that might more properly belong to the young Robert Redford, who played the criminal who has just escaped from a Texas prison and is being chased by Brando’s sheriff. The latter is hoping to catch Redford’s desperado before he discovers his wife (Jane Fonda) is having an affair with the town’s wealthy businessman, who has the lawmen in his pocket. Brando has the smaller role and is, at this stage of his career, heavier set and slower moving, beginning to concede the star roles to a younger generation. But he still has that power and sleekness to his bearing.
8. Last Tango in Paris (1972)
No film of Brando’s has become discredited more than this drama of death, grief and obsessive sex. Brando is stricken widower Paul, whose wife might have taken her own life (or been driven to it by Paul); he tries to cauterise his spiritual agony with regular, brutally anonymous and explicit sex with hippy-chick Jeanne, played by Maria Schneider. Her air of vulnerability is very disquieting since the revelation in 2013 that Brando and director Bernardo Bertolucci planned the improvised “butter” scene without telling Schneider and she therefore felt in effect raped. Perhaps there is no way of seeing past this, but Brando’s performance has that ruined leonine hauteur, a vast disgust and self-disgust – and there is inspiration in his final Cagneyesque top-of-the-world moment in Maria’s apartment in which he does his florid Briton accent. This is a movie experience about nausea; more nausea than its creators realised.
Brando’s Mark Antony in Julius Caesar. Photograph: ScreenProd/Photononstop/Alamy
7. Julius Caesar (1953)
Mark Antony was a part that Brando was born to play: his extraordinary profile could appear on a Roman coin or statue. It was a film reportedly inspired by the success of Olivier’s Henry V and here, fascinatingly, Brando portrays the role with the absolute assurance and distinction of someone who has had classical training, a great relief to those who worried that he could only perform in mumbling method-speak. How fascinating would it have been to see Brando play Coriolanus, or Leontes, or Lear; he might well have been the American Olivier, although here I have to say that his English-Bardspeak accent is in misplaced good taste. (And maybe The Godfather was his Shakespearean career-climax.) Director Joseph L Mankiewicz and producer John Houseman should have encouraged him to speak in his normal American accent.
6. The Wild One (1953)
A decade before the counterculture got into full swing, this outlaw biker movie – in effect banned in the UK until 1967 – gave us a hint of the forthcoming speed-thrills of rebellion, starring Brando as leather-clad Johnny, leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club. (In fact, motorbike lawlessness had been in evidence in the US since the end of the war.) “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” a young woman asks. “What’ve you got?” Brando famously replies – incidentally reviving the memory of Groucho Marx’s song I’m Against It in Horse Feathers. Johnny is against the older generation, against the idea of marriage and getting a job, against everything and nothing. Brando’s sheer physical heft and presence lend a kind of meaning and purpose to his outlaw vocation.
5. One-Eyed Jacks (1961)
This stark and mesmeric revenge western, co-written by Sam Peckinpah, which Brando co-produced and wound up directing himself, is his sole directing credit, having originally hired Stanley Kubrick. He plays Rio, the bank robber who works with (older) partner, “Dad” Longworth, played by Karl Malden. After one lucrative job in Mexico, the two-faced Dad leaves Rio to be captured by the cops and Rio does five years in prison. On release, Rio fanatically tracks Dad down to discover his former comrade has now reinvented himself as a respectable lawman and sheriff; things are complicated further when Rio falls for Dad’s stepdaughter Louisa (Pina Pellicer). There is something Freudian in his conflicted need to kill, or not kill, “Dad”.
Brando as the all-singing, all-dancing Sky Masterson. Photograph: Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy
4. Guys and Dolls (1955)
Brando was never thought of as a musical star before or after Guys and Dolls, which feels like an outlier – and yet Brando gives a glorious performance as inveterate gambler and romantic Sky Masterson who falls in love with Jean Simmons’s Salvation Army stalwart Sarah Brown. Brando sings his own numbers without dubbing and his version of Luck Be a Lady, although clearly not the work of a Broadway pro, is still an absolute showstopper. Brando reportedly had a chilly on-set relationship with Frank Sinatra, who played Nathan Detroit – something that continued to rankle with Sinatra when he saw the Johnny Fontaine character in The Godfather 17 years later, and realised who it was supposed to be.
3. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
Kazan was a passionate, intuitive director of actors and Brando did some of his very best work for him – and in Tennessee Williams’s famous drama Brando truly detonates his sexuality and rage. He plays Stanley, the sullen, moody, swaggering and often shirtless husband of Kim Hunter’s Stella living in a tough part of New Orleans. Stella’s highly strung, refined sister Blanche (played by Vivien Leigh ) comes to stay, and from the very first, she ignites a deeply ambiguous mix of desire, wariness and class-based resentment in Stanley. It is a toxic chemistry. Does Stanley want to go to bed with her? Does he want to punish Blanche for apparently squandering her parents’ money to which, as brother-in-law, he considers himself partly entitled? Is Blanche a projection of Williams himself, tauntingly seeing and provoking the mixed-up feelings in so many young men? Brando instinctively and sensually embodies all of this; it is a role that unlocked so much of his acting genius.
2. On the Waterfront (1954)
This was the movie that most fully allowed Brando to be a tragic hero and a figure who directly engages with contemporary America. In a tale ripped from the headlines, he is Terry Molloy, an ex-boxer turned dockyard worker, demeaningly running errands for the corrupt union mob boss and beginning to go to seed, nursing a muddled and self-destructive rage. He could have been a contender, but his brother Charley (Rod Steiger) persuaded him to throw a key fight to enrich this same mob boss and his career was never the same again. Now Terry is convulsed with shame for having connived at the murder of a longshoreman who was going to testify about corrupt practices, and he falls in love with the dead man’s sister, played by Eva Marie Saint. Brando conveyed all the inarticulate pain, aimless uncertainty and dissatisfaction with the world; he is a tough guy with a gallant streak and the soul of a poet.
Brando as Vito Corleone in The Godfather. Photograph: Cinetext/Paramount/Paramount Pictures/Allstar
1. The Godfather (1972)
Apart from everything else, Brando’s sensational starring role in Francis Ford Coppola’s Shakespearean mob drama was an amazing comeback. Just when everyone thought that Brando was on the slide, he returned suddenly as an obviously older man, but with a power and reach even greater than that of the lithe and potent performances of his youth. All of his mannerisms, the faintly adenoidal speaking voice, the muscular assertion, the almost ethereally inarticulate expression of pain; they had now a new maturity and poignancy. His Vito Corleone, presiding over a powerful crime family in postwar America, is fearful of losing his power, and unsure which of the younger generation will carry on the flame. His presence at the wedding scene, receiving petitioners in his darkened study surrounded by consiglieri, is unforgettable, as his later speech, telling the other capi at the peace summit what he will and will not forgive even as his own authority is ebbing away. This was Brando’s claim to movie immortality.
Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of April’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)
New to Amazon Prime Video
‘Fallout’ Season 1 Starts streaming: April 11
This sardonic postapocalyptic action-adventure series combines elements from different games within the larger “Fallout” video game franchise, which since its debut in 1997 has delighted gamers with a mix of rich storytelling and wry wit. The series has Ella Purnell playing Lucy, an exemplary citizen in an underground bunker colony on an Earth ravaged by nuclear warfare. When circumstances force Lucy to the surface, the sunny optimism she learned from her father (Kyle MacLachlan) is tested by her encounters with scavengers, mutants and heavily armed soldiers in robotic armor. Developed by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (the team behind “Westworld”) with the showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet (the co-writer of “Captain Marvel”) and Graham Wagner (a “Portlandia” writer), “Fallout” aims to be the rollicking, irreverent counter to all the dour end-of-the-world TV shows.
Also arriving:
April 1 “House” Season 1
April 4 “Música”
April 5 “How to Date Billy Walsh” “Alex Rider” Season 3
April 12 “Apartment 404”
April 18 “Dinner With the Parents” Season 1 “Going Home With Tyler Cameron” Season 1
April 25 “Them: The Scare” Season 2
New to Apple TV+
‘Girls State’ Starts streaming: April 5
The 2020 documentary “Boys State” followed a group of Texas high schoolers at a politics-themed summer camp. For this sequel, the directors Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine cover a similar camp from a different perspective, embedding with Missouri high school girls as they run for office, draft resolutions and hear court cases, emulating the functions of a state government. This particular edition of Missouri’s Girls State was held on the same campus as Boys State, inviting direct comparison between the programs (which differ in their levels of rigor). It also happened not long after the draft of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision was leaked. As with the earlier film, Moss and McBaine avoid turning their subjects into simplistic heroes or villains. Instead, “Girls State” honors these bright, concerned young ladies’ earnest interest in making friends and becoming better leaders.
‘Sugar’ Season 1 Starts streaming: April 5
Colin Farrell stars in this highly meta detective series, playing a private eye, John Sugar, who loves old movies and models a lot of his behavior after his Hollywood heroes. When he takes an assignment to find the missing daughter of a legendary film producer (James Cromwell), he uncovers some dark truths about show business that challenge his preconceptions about human nature. There is another layer to “Sugar,” revealed late in the season and best left unspoiled. But for the most part, this show is a stylish neo-noir exercise with a stellar cast, including Amy Ryan, Anna Gunn, Nate Corddry, Eric Lange and Kirby.
‘Franklin’ Starts streaming: April 12
Michael Douglas plays Benjamin Franklin in this historical drama, based on Stacy Schiff’s nonfiction book “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America.” Set during the years when Franklin served as the ambassador to France for the fledgling United States — and tried to turn his international fame into money for the new nation — the mini-series captures the complicated diplomacy of a radical era. Noah Jupe plays William Temple Franklin, the founding father’s grandson, assistant and protégé, who is overwhelmed by the courtly glamour of Paris. Co-written by Kirk Ellis (best-known for the mini-series “John Adams”) and Howard Korder (a playwright who worked on “Boardwalk Empire”), “Franklin” is at times a fish-out-of-water comedy and at times a political thriller, but it’s primarily about men and women struggling to steer the direction of a rapidly changing world.
Also arriving:
April 3 “Loot”
April 24 “The Big Door Prize”
New to Disney+
‘Bluey: The Sign’ Starts streaming: April 14
A typical episode of the beloved animated kids show “Bluey” is about 10 minutes long, capturing some small and often enchanting moment in the lives of a family of Australian dogs. The new special episode “The Sign” runs about triple that length, and tells a story about … well, actually both Disney in the United States and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation overseas are staying mum about the plot, though the commercials for the episode do imply that Bluey and Bingo and their parents and friends are headed toward some sort of celebratory event. More important for American “Bluey” fans: “The Sign” will be available stateside on the same day it airs in Australia, sparing us the usual multi-month wait.
Also arriving:
April 3 “Wish”
April 22 “Tiger” “Tiger on the Rise”
New to Hulu
‘The Greatest Hits’ Starts streaming: April 12
In this unusual romantic drama, Lucy Boynton plays Harriet, a woman who loves music so intensely that when she hears certain songs her consciousness is transported back in time, to relive moments she spent with her boyfriend Max (David Corenswet), who died. This makes it hard for Harriet to live her life, since at any moment a song in a coffee shop or wafting out of a passing car could knock her into the past. And it’s especially hard for her to pursue a new relationship with David (Justin H. Min), a grieving guy from her support group. Written and directed by Ned Benson (making his first movie since 2013’s well-reviewed but distribution-challenged “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby”), “The Greatest Hits” takes a fresh approach to a common story, about people having trouble letting go of their pasts.
‘Under the Bridge’ Starts streaming: April 17
Based on Rebecca Godfrey’s nonfiction book “Under the Bridge: The True Story of the Murder of Reena Virk” — about teenagers accused of murdering a classmate in a small British Columbia town in 1997 — this mini-series stars Riley Keough as Godfrey, researching her book by getting close to the suspects. Lily Gladstone plays the local police officer Cam Bentland, who has her own reasons for wanting to get to the bottom of what actually happened and why. Created by Quinn Shephard — an indie filmmaker known for the dark, youth-oriented dramas “Blame” and “Not Okay” — “Under the Bridge” follows the lead of Godfrey’s reporting by offering an empathetic look at a culture of partying and bullying in an isolated community.
‘The Veil’ Starts streaming: April 30
The “Peaky Blinders” creator Steven Knight returns to television for this six-episode mini-series, starring Elisabeth Moss as Imogen Salter, an MI6 agent called in to help with a tricky situation at a Syrian refugee camp. Yumna Marwan plays Adilah, a fugitive believed to be a notorious, mysterious terrorist commander. Josh Charles plays Max, a C.I.A. agent often at odds with Imogen over how to get the truth out of Adilah. As the two women travel across Europe, they talk about their lives — though both of them have ulterior motives behind every moment of candor. “The Veil” leans heavy on Knight’s two strengths as a writer: punchy dialogue and twisty action plots.
Also arriving:
April 1 “Don’t Worry Darling” “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” “Vanderpump Villa” Season 1
April 3 “U.F.O. Factory” Season 1
April 5 “Dinosaur” Season 1
April 6 “The Fable” Season 1
April 7 “GO! GO! Loser Ranger!” Season 1 “Mission: Yozakura Family” Season 1
April 10 “Blood Free” Season 1 “Curtain Call” Season 1 “Grand Cayman: Secrets in Paradise” Season 1 “The Incredible Dr. Pol” Season 24
April 11 “Immediate Family”
April 15 “The Stranger”
April 17 “Drain the Oceans” Season 6 “Dr. Oakley, Yukon Vet” Season 12 “See You in Another Life” Season 1
April 20 “High Hopes” Season 1
April 22 “Hip-Hop and the White House”
April 24 “Wonderful World” Season 1
April 26 “Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story”
April 27 “Broken Horses”
New to Max
‘The Sympathizer’ Starts streaming: April 14
Based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — adapted for television by the Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook and the Canadian filmmaker Don McKellar — this mini-series covers several years in the life of a Vietnamese immigrant with a complicated past. Hoa Xuande plays the protagonist and narrator known as “the Captain,” who lived a cosmopolitan lifestyle before the Vietnam War. Because of his familiarity with the West, he was drafted by the North Vietnamese to go undercover with the South Vietnamese. When Saigon falls, the Captain catches a transport to the United States, where he continues his spying, observing firsthand how his new neighbors are rewriting America’s history with the war. Robert Downey Jr. pops up throughout the series in multiple roles, reinforcing the theme of people caught between different identities.
Also arriving:
April 4 “Hop” Season 1 “The Synanon Fix”
April 5 “The Zone of Interest”
April 6 “Alex Edelman: Just for Us”
April 9 “Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion”
April 16 “An American Bombing: The Road to April 19th”
April 18 “Conan O’Brien Must Go” Season 1
April 21 “The Jinx: Part 2”
April 26 “We’re Here” Season 4
New to Paramount+
‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Season 5 Starts streaming: April 4
In 2017, the first season of “Star Trek: Discovery” brought renewed interest to the TV franchise and helped establish the bona fides of the CBS All Access subscription streaming service (later rebranded as Paramount+). In the years since, other new “Star Trek” series — especially “Strange New Worlds” and “Lower Decks” — have built on what “Discovery” started, telling new and meaningful “Star Trek” stories while staying true to a long legacy. “Discovery” is coming to an end with its fifth season; but it’s going out strong, with a rollicking multipart adventure that sees the crews of multiple starships teaming up on a cross-galaxy chase, in search of a centuries-old treasure that may hold the secret to life itself.
Also arriving:
April 1 “Talk to Me”
April 10 “The Challenge: All Stars” Season 4
April 12 “Dora” Season 1
April 14 “The 100th: Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden — The Greatest Arena Run of All Time”
