Brando...Interesting

The "line" on Marlon Brando is that after an initial "glory period" in the fifties consisting of:

The Men
Streetcar Named Desire
Viva Zapata
The Wild One
On the Waterfront
and..maybe Julius Caesar

...his career rather spiraled down and flattened out thereafter, all the way to his back-to-back comebacks in The Godfather(1972) and Last Tango in Paris(1973.)

In his autobio, Brando pointed out that even if he "came back" in The Godfather, he had never really been away. He worked constantly...pretty much a movie every year, in the sixties. But just not in movies that had the power and cachet of his "glory run."

(Note in passing: both Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino, as well, had "glory runs" in the 1970s which were never really matched by their later work, except intermittently.)

Part of Brando's problem in the 60's was that he had a contract with Universal, which wasn't making very good movies back then, so he ended up in The Ugly American, and Bedtime Story(the original "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels") and a bad Western called The Appaloosa and a rather clunky thriller called "The Night of the Following Day." Brando thought that one of the Universal contract movies -- A Countess From Hong Kong, directed by a very old Charlie Chaplin -- would be an artful classic, but Chaplin had long since lost it.

Brando bolted to a few other studios for a few other movies in the 60's.

One of those movies was Morituri, aka The Saboteur(not to be confused with Hitchcock's Saboteur of 1942.)

I watched Morituri the other day. Its very "1965" in its black-and-white modern-but-not-really-look.

And I thought...Brando was quite good in it. He seemed committed to the part. He was intelligent in it. His character had some reasonable angst. And in one key scene, after one key character is murdered before Brando's eyes, he gets a "star close-up" (angled from his best side) that practically screams: "BRANDO." The special, exotic handsomeness of the man. The deep emotion he could convey. Its like a "superstar moment" in the middle of a film that really doesn't deserve it.

I found the WWII plot to be muddled and rather overlong, but these things stood out:

Yul Brynner as the over-the-title co-star. Brando and Brynner sharing the screen also share a certain ethnic, exotic quality: these guys aren't William Holden and Richard Widmark. And they get a good scene together near the end of the film. But...Brynner's not in the film nearly as much as Brando, he comes close to "support." One realizes the Brynner, his career burnished by The King and I(Best Actor Oscar) and The Magnificent Seven(1960) was running out of gas as a marquee star...he would devolve down, in the 70's , to milking his two most famous roles: with a short-lived "King and I" TV series, and wearing his Mag 7 black clothes as the killer robot gunslinger in Westworld. This stint with the Mighty Brando may be the last Yul Brynner star performance.

Wally Cox in a few scenes. The smouldering Brando and the pipsqueak Cox were evidently buddies all the way back to childhood(though I've read that Cox would sometimes hide when Brando came over to play), but here is our chance to see them in a couple of dramatic scenes, with Cox missing his Mr. Peepers eyeglasses and coming across as a kind of 1965 William H. Macy, which is to say: good.

A big lush Jerry Goldsmith score. There is something about 1965 "middle-of-the-decade movies." Often about WWII (only over for 20 years at the time.) Rather glossy of film stock and modern looking(1960 movies are more like the fifties; 1968 movies are more psychedelic.) Morituri is very 1965...and rather serious, stodgy and over-talky. So there's Jerry Goldsmith putting one of his big, thunderous exciting thriller scores over the rather grim drama(which has thriller aspects to be sure: Brando's an undercover man POSING as a Nazi to blow up a ship). Its not a bad score, but it overmatches the modest movie.

Janet Margolin's shocking speech about Nazi sexual atrocities. The "R" rating was till almost 4 years away, but in one scene the pretty Margolin recounts the perverse sexual tortures imposed upon her Jewish family and..one speech is worth a thousand pictures. I'm shocked this got past the censors, but...the code was breaking down.

Trevor Howard doing an early scene(a cameo) with Brando. Ostensibly, they didn't get along on the disaster that was "Mutiny on the Bounty"(1962) but...here they are again. I suppose Trevor Howard said "its just business" and his character DOES get to threatening German pacifist Brando with prison if he doesn't go on a possible suicide mission pf undercover work and sabotage.