5 Classic Marlon Brando Movies That Haven’t Aged Well Today

Marlon Brando is almost impossible to leave out of any serious conversation about the greatest actors in film history. A seismic presence in American cinema, he helped transform screen acting itself and created unforgettable characters in classics like “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now” that remain part of pop culture conversation decades later. To study American movie performance is, inevitably, to spend time with Brando’s most celebrated work. Still, the actor’s career was as erratic as it was influential, and his filmography also includes some deeply regrettable misfires.

Because Brando’s impact was so vast, the weaker and more troubling chapters of his career deserve scrutiny too. For all his reputation as a Hollywood rule-breaker who pushed against traditional acting conventions, Brando also starred in films that upheld some of the industry’s most damaging habits instead of dismantling them. The Marlon Brando movies that are hardest to watch today make that contradiction painfully clear. Several of these titles were once embraced by audiences, critics, or the box office, but early success has done little to protect them from aging terribly.

Whether because of offensive creative choices, dated storytelling, or misguided performances, these five Marlon Brando vehicles prove that even one of cinema’s most gifted actors did not always choose wisely. In some cases, his instincts led him into projects that were problematic from the start.

Donald Bogle’s book “Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood” recalls a late-1940s letter written by Betsy Blair, the acclaimed performer and then-wife of Gene Kelly, to Hollywood’s major guilds. In it, Blair urged the industry to radically improve the way non-white characters, particularly Black characters, were represented on screen. Among the examples she cited was the disturbing practice of casting white performers in Black roles. The racism of blackface and related traditions was not some later-discovered problem; its ugliness was being plainly called out even in the 1940s.

Yet almost 10 years after that warning, Hollywood was still leaning on dehumanizing casting choices. One glaring example was the 1956 comedy “The Teahouse of the August Moon,” which featured Marlon Brando as Sakini, a Japanese interpreter. Though the film has largely slipped from mainstream memory, Brando’s performance continues to draw criticism today. The story was intended to show Japanese and American characters finding common ground, but even that already simplistic framing carried uneasy weight in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whatever message of understanding the film hoped to deliver was badly undermined by Brando’s exaggerated, caricatured portrayal.

Playing this individual like an aggressively arch cartoon character, Brando’s performance sank any attempts by “The Teahouse of the August Moon” to work as a piece of art. If only the film’s producers had heeded Betsy Blair’s warnings from years earlier. 

Part of the untold truth of Marlon Brando was that he was basically all washed up as a bankable actor by the end of the 1960s. Then, “The Godfather” came around, and in one fell swoop, Brando’s star was restored. Easily one of Marlon Brando’s best movies, “The Godfather” gave this performer a new lease on life that prior boondoggles like “Mutiny on the Bounty” made impossible to obtain. But just before his Don Vito Corleone performance changed everything, he headlined “The Nightcomers” as Peter Quint. This Michael Winner directorial effort functioned as a prequel to the famous novella “The Turn of the Screw” and co-starred Stephanie Beacham and Thora Hird, among others.

At the time of its release, Brando secured a BAFTA best actor nomination for “Nightcomers.” Unfortunately, not every aspect of the movie is still regarded so loftily. For one thing, Brando’s  decision to give Quint a peculiar Irish accent has earned its fair share of modern ribbing. Meanwhile, the project’s attempt of being a cozy prequel to “The Turning of the Screw” has only garnered more controversy with time, especially given how many subsequent prequels with similarly tidy narrative impulses have dominated theaters. The blueprint for their failures was laid down by “The Nightcomers.”

While less egregious than some films on this list, “The Nightcomers” has still aged weirdly and not for the better.

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A year after “The Teahouse of the August Moon,” Brando returned to anchor another movie about American and Japanese cultures colliding with “Sayonara.” Here, he portrayed Major Lloyd “Ace” Gruver, who, while stationed in Japan, falls in love with Hana-ogi (Miiko Taka). Their relationship is complicated by America declaring mixed-race marriages illegal and Gruver already being engaged to Eileen (Patricia Owens). When it first hit theaters, “Sayonara” was a critical triumph. It scored a whopping ten Oscar nominations and even won a slew of them, including acting victories for supporting performers Red Buttons and Miyoshi Umeki.

Decades after its debut, though, assessments of “Sayonara” are more complicated than the enduringly euphoric reputation of the best movies of the 1950s. Writer Scarlet Cheng of the Los Angeles Times, for one, observed that “Sayonara” and its pleas for racial tolerance were undercut by its often dehumanizing perspective on Japanese-American women, specifically in idealizing them as “subservient” to white men. The title’s stereotypical approach to depicting Japanese culture has also been critiqued in modern reviews. Similarly troublesome and persistently controversial is its reductive approach to Japanese-American men, embodied by Ricardo Montalban in yellowface to portray the most prominent Japanese-American male character.

While “Sayonara” presented itself as forward-thinking, it unfortunately fell into common Hollywood traps when depicting foreign countries. No amount of Oscar glory can erase these frustrating issues.

For anyone hoping that “The Teahouse of the August Moon” was the only example of Marlon Brando unfortunately playing a non-white ethnicity, think again. As if ratting out his friends to HUAC wasn’t bad enough, director Elia Kazan’s 1950s exploits also included helming “Viva Zapata!,” where Brando played legendary Mexican figure Emiliano Zapata. Two years after “Viva Zapata!” hit theaters, the excellent pro-labor movie “Salt of the Earth” populated its cast with actual Mexican performers like Rosaura Revueltas and Juan Chacón. Meanwhile, “Viva Zapata!” put Brando, Jean Peters, Joseph Wiseman, and others in brownface and called it a day.

When it first hit theaters, “Viva Zapata!” did quite well in establishing a positive reputation. Brando even won a prestigious Cannes award for his performance asZapata. However, this title eventually became another popular movie that aged terribly. In hindsight, “Viva Zapata!” has come under fire for being so far removed from Mexican culture and history that it came off as unintentionally comical. Then there’s the use of the one major Mexican performer, Anthony Quinn, as a traitorous villain while the white people in brownface get to be heroic.

Everything about “Viva Zapata!” was woefully miscalculated, which makes it downright cringe-worthy to watch today. Spend your time watching actual ’50s Mexican films, such as Luis Buñuel’s “Él,” instead.

Today considered one of the best 1970s movies of all time, “Last Tango in Paris” was an instant critical darling when it was released in 1972. No less than Pauline Kael hailed it as a landmark event in cinema, while Martin Scorsese praised “Last Tango in Paris” as a microcosm of what made director Bernardo Bertolucci special. However, a dark cloud hovers over this motion picture. “Last Tango in Paris” features a scene involving Marlon Brando’s Paul raping Jeanne (Maria Schneider). The execution of that moment, and especially its use of butter, was not cleared with Schneider beforehand.

“They only told me about it before we had to film the scene and I was so angry … I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci,” Schneider recalled in 2007 with Daily Mail. “After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologize. Marlon said to me: ‘Maria, don’t worry, it’s just a movie,’ but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn’t real, I was crying real tears.” This horrifying and harrowing account, coupled with Bertolucci declaring “I feel guilty, but I don’t regret it” in response to Schneider’s testimony (via The Guardian), has now put “Last Tango in Paris” in an unavoidable new light.

Whatever its initial power, the larger context of “Last Tango in Paris” now boils down to it being a movie where two men traumatized a 19-year-old actor.