1972 Drama
books | dvds | posters | videos
cast
crew
Bernardo Bertolucci
Alberto Grimaldi
Bernardo Bertolucci, Franco Arcalli
Vittorio Storaro
Franco Arcalli, Roberto Perpignani
Gato Barbieri, Oliver Nelson (arr.)
Ferdinando Scarfiatti
(PEA/Artistes Associes)
Marlon Brando
- [ l a s t t a n g o i n p a r i s : m o v i e r e v i e w ]
- 1973: Nominations: Best Director, Actor (Marlon Brando)
- Extract from the book:
Marlon Brando - available: amazon.co.uk
Oscars:- 1950: Nominations: Best Story & Screenplay
Classification: 
-
'Bertolucci was in love with Marlon Brando,
and that's what the movie was about.'
- Maria Schneider
Bertolucci's movie came at a personal and career crossroads for Brando, and maybe he knew that. It ended up being
his pre-eminent film, certainly the most radical, and his work
in it stands apart from everything else he had done. Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker:
Bertolucci, then thirty-one, recalls his first meeting with
Brando at the Hotel Raphal in Paris in the spring of 1971.
"He just sat and looked at me for fifteen minutes without
speaking." The director felt shy and in awe of Brando; he had first seen him in the movies as Zapata when he was a kid. "And then Marlon began talking in sweet Tahitian French "
Bertolucci would say he learned to speak English from
Marlon Brando, who mumbles a lot, "which is why nobody
understands me."
The following day, at Brando's request, Bertolucci screened
his latest film, The Conformist, starring Dominique Sanda
and Jean-Paul Trintignant (whom he had originally wanted
for Tango). Set in 1930s Fascist Italy, the story is about an
upper-class follower of Mussolini; the production had been
highly praised for its sensuous texture and velvety operatic
style. After it was over, Brando nodded in approval. He added
that a friend whose judgment he really respected had insisted
he see the film. Bertolucci learned that the friend was an
elegant Chinese lady named Anita Kong, one of Brando's
longtime lovers. She had seen it seven times.
Then Brando asked, "What's your idea for me?" and Bertolucci described the part he envisioned for him, that of Paul, an
American expatriate living in Paris, middle-aged, despairing,
whose French wife, Rose, has just inexplicably committed
suicide in the fleabag hotel she owns. By chance Paul runs into
a free-spirited young woman, Jeanne, in the empty apartment
they're both thinking of renting. He abruptly seduces her,
rents the apartment, and what follows is a doomed "sex-only" affair that lasts for three days. Together they experience
sex constantly—taboo sex, sordid, dirty, obscene, violent
sex—no questions asked. Sex is all that matters.
Brando said the idea was intriguing. Bertolucci told him
what he really wanted him to agree to was to improvise on
the material. "All my actors are co-authors of my movies," the
director said. Brando said he still wanted to see a script.
By the summer of 1971 Bertolucci had completed a screenplay of Tango with Franco Arcalli in Rome, and he sent it to
Brando. Then he flew out to Los Angeles to meet with him.
For the next three weeks he spent most of his time at the
actor's home at the top of Mulholland Drive, having long
discussions on a variety of subjects: love, sex, girls, and their
experiences with Freudian analysis.
At first Brando seemed moody shifting back and forth
from emotional openness to cool detachment. By the end of
the second week Bertolucci had broken down some of his
defenses when he confided how he'd come up with the story
of Tango: that it had been a secret fantasy of his to make love
to an unknown woman over and over again in an isolated
room and never need to know anything about her. He said
he'd been influenced by Louis Ferdinand Celine, the half-crazed Parisian who believed that human beings are categorized as either voyeurs or exhibitionists. He'd also been
influenced by Georges Bataille, who wrote highly charged,
perverse short stories about lovers so obsessed with each
other's bodies they wanted to "breathe in their farts and
breathe in their comes....This is what I want Tango to suggest,"
he said.
The director said he wanted Brando to superimpose
himself on the character of Paul, to confront the role completely from inside himself, inside his own guts.
Bit by bit, Brando began to describe his traumatic child-
hood in Libertyville. Bertolucci listened, fascinated. It soon
became obvious that the central drama in the actor's life had
been his love-hate relationship with his father.
The two men did not talk about his children. That subject
was off limits. Brando was having trouble with his oldest son,
Christian, then in his teens, who was drinking and taking
drugs. Brando could not control him, and he was worried
and anxious all the time.
In the meantime Alberto Grimaldi became the producer
of Last Tango, even though he was suing Brando for $700,000
for his "inappropriate behavior" during the filming of Burn!
Grimaldi happened to be Bertolucci's cousin, but he also
liked the Tango script and thought Brando would be perfect
for the role. He offered to drop the suit and pay Brando
$250,000 plus 10 percent of the gross. Brando agreed immediately.
Bertolucci returned to the exhibit time and time again,
and he took his cameraman, Vittorio Storaro, as well as his
costume and set designers, who were inspired by the colors
Bacon used: the reds, the yellows, the browns. When Brando
arrived in Paris in late January—with his secretary, Alice
Marchak, and his makeup man, Phil Rhodes—he went to the
exhibit too.
Bertolucci commented:
They both agreed on the casting of the nineteen-year-old baby-faced Maria Schneider as Jeanne. Schneider was
uninhibited, voluptuous, a self-proclaimed bisexual, and the
illegitimate daughter of actor Daniel Gelin, one of Brando's
oldest friends. She had little acting experience but won the
part over two hundred other actresses because when she was
asked to take off her clothes during her screen test, she did
so with supreme self-confidence. Bertolucci said:
The first day she was introduced to Brando, he asked for
her astrological sign. They were both Aries, they discovered.
Then he sat with her in a cafe and, hoping to unsettle her,
had a staring contest.
"Sometimes," she told him, staring back at him unwaveringly. He was so impressed he sent her flowers that evening, with a note scrawled in Chinese. "What do those characters
mean?" she asked.
"I'm not going to tell you," he said.
From then on, he was "like Daddy," Schneider said later,
especially in the scene in Tango when he gives her a bath and
soaps her naked body as tenderly as he might have one of his
own baby daughters.
It's interesting to note that while Maria Schneider had an
amoral charm and was good in Last Tango, she was not great,
but then Brando in recent years hadn't had adequate leading
ladies. However, Schneider did pale beside Brando. Was it
because she was so young and callow? Critic David Thomson
called her "trite." He felt if Brando had had a really compelling
woman to play opposite, she would have tested him. Or was
it because, like Garbo, Brando simply dominates space and
the viewer's eye automatically goes to him? Critic Andrew
Sarris once wrote that Brando had to be the center of attention
in his films, and even when he was acting with his peers,
like Trevor Howard, say, or Anna Magnani, he constantly
throttled them psychologically with ad-libs and constant
takes so they became virtually invisible. Bertolucci says that
Brando is "an angel as a man and a monster as an actor."
Just before shooting began, director and actor met, as they
subsequently met every day, in private, often at breakfast, in
Brando's rented apartment near the Arc de Triomphe. There
they decided what scenes to do, how much to improvise, and
why. (The infamous butter scene was thought up by Brando
over cafe au lait.) The director kept reminding Brando he
wanted him to find the character of Paul by remembering
what was inside himself. The past, deadly and implacable, is
the other big theme of Tango, he kept telling him.
This was the way Brando had imagined filmmaking could
be: a total collaboration between actor and director. It would
be like working with Kazan on Streetcar and Waterfront and
Zapata. He could test himself in ways that many of his more
recent directors had dismissed as eccentric self-indulgence.
Phil Rhodes, who was always with him on the set, said he
hadn't seen him so excited by a movie in years. He told Rhodes
that in Tango, he would be allowed to take his improvisations
further than he ever had before; he was willing to pull from
himself his most painful memories. He felt challenged by the
risks, although he did see it as a violation of his privacy.
Bertolucci admitted he was scared that first day, because:
As usual, Brando was able to physicalize the character of
Paul to a remarkable degree. Take his initial appearance in
the abandoned apartment on Rue Jules Verne. Suddenly we
see him emerging out of nowhere, hunched over by the radiator. He is dressed in a long brown cashmere coat, and he is
hugging himself. It is as if he's possessed by some terrible,
unconscious urge.
When he makes love to Jeanne for the first time, it's quick
and primal; he bends over her, his coat still on; she wraps her
legs around him. They come together convulsively, then break
apart and fall on the floor, rolling away from each other,
panting like animals.
The central scenes in the movie take place in the empty
apartment, which serves as a background for all their passionate trysts. These are interspersed with glimpses of their
real lives outside the apartment: Paul organizing his wife's
funeral; Jeanne cavorting with her fiance, a young film director, played by Jean-Pierre Leaud.
We see the scene of Paul's wife's suicide in her bloody hotel
bathroom, juxtaposed with a scene of Paul and Jeanne in
the empty apartment; he's insisting:
It's his desperate attempt to stay in the "fucking present." For Paul, "hapenis" is the brutal domination and degradation of Jeanne, who is excited and
intrigued. The sexuality they expressed was unprecedented
in feature films at that time: frontal nudity, masturbation,
and sodomy, all of which were explored by Bertolucci's "voyeuristic eye." At times Brando also seems to be acting out his
own fantasies of anonymous, violent sex.
Although the movie appears to be totally improvised, there
were entire scenes of written dialogue, which Brando kept
forgetting. He began using cue cards hidden among the props
and behind the camera. Bertolucci, like Coppola before him,
tried to deal with the actor's inability to memorize. Was it
dyslexia, as one of his friends surmised, or was it simply
the actor's impulse to be so strongly in the moment that
memorized words got in the way? Bertolucci came to the
conclusion that:
Bertolucci often seemed confused as to what Last Tango was
actually about. Brando later said to Rolling Stonemagazine:
Swedish director Ingmar Bergman thought the movie was
really about two men. Maria Schneider maintained:
She added that she and Brando got along "because we're both bisexual."
Later Brando wearily admitted to a French film magazine
that yes, he'd had homosexual experiences, as most men had.
Originally, Bertolucci planned to have his two actors make
actual love on-screen. Brando said in an interview:
After the film had been released, Norman Mailer wrote:
But Last Tango ended up as a kind of
celebrity drama, with Brando as its unwitting star, and indeed
part of the film's shock value is the ultimate illusion that we
are seeing a sex symbol actually Doing It.
Christian was discovered in a hippie commune somewhere
near Baja California. He was hiding under a pile of clothes,
obviously distraught and traumatized. One of the hippies
admitted to the authorities that Kashfi had promised them
thirty thousand dollars to hide her son. It was part of her
pathetic, drug-induced attempt to reclaim custody of Christian.
By that time Anna Kashfi had become a very sad, very
lost lady. Angry, deluded, paranoid, no longer beautiful, she
suffered from epileptic fits and terrible mood swings and was
a heavy drinker and pill taker. She had turned Christian's
childhood into a nightmare, and Brando fought constantly
to get custody, confessing to friends he was afraid that Christian was going to be "destroyed by his mother's weirdness." (Today, nearly destitute, Kashfi lives with a friend in San Diego.)
Brando appeared in court in Santa Monica with his son.
He did not press kidnapping charges. Although the judge
would not give him sole custody, he did agree to let him
take the boy to Paris and stay with him for the next twelve
months.
Meanwhile Brando was supposed to fly to New York for
the premiere of The Godfather. Robert Evans kept trying to
persuade him to appear. It was the biggest and most important opening of the year. But Brando refused. He did not want
to put Christian through any more sensational publicity,
since the tabloids had been covering "the kidnapping" for
days.
By then, of course, The Godfather was on its way to being
a huge hit, and Brando was acknowledged once again as the
greatest actor of his generation. Newsweek magazine gushed,
"The king has returned to his throne." There were cover
stories in Time and Life heralding Marlon Brando's astonishing comeback.
Vincent Canby, in the New York Times, summed it up very
nicely, calling The Godfather one of the most brutal and
moving chronicles of American life ever designed within the
limits of popular entertainment. He went on to say:
Richard Schickel noted:
By the time Brando returned to Paris with his son, his present
wife, Tarita, had arrived from French Polynesia. She always
made him feel especially secure, and she remained with him
at his hotel until he completed filming. His huge success as
the Godfather had energized him, and he improvised in Tango
with even more intensity and commitment. He became
totally invested in the role. Fernand Moskowitz, the
assistant director, told Peter Manso:
This was especially true in one of the climactic scenes of
the movie, when he talks about his past. The night before he
filmed the scene, according to Peter Manso, Brando confided
to Bertolucci that he wasn't sure whether he could dig so far
down inside himself. It was just too painful.
Bertolucci told him, "Think of the nightmare about your
children." This was a frightening dream he'd recounted to
Bertolucci a few days before. Brando glared at him as if he
wanted to kill him, but he agreed to do the scene. Bertolucci
was urging him to "act out," as Kazan had urged him to do
in the past, with Streetcar and Waterfront.
His make-up man, Phil Rhodes, who had been with him on
almost every movie he had ever done, said:
Rhodes had seen Brando use his hostility toward
his father in a film only once before, when George Englund
had urged him to base his portrayal of the ambassador in The
Ugly American on Senior, and Brando agreed, even though
he hated himself for doing it. It was the same with Tango.
We see him lying on the mattress, playing his harmonica,
and Jeanne asks him, "What do you do?"
He starts out by describing his past. He's been a boxer, an
actor, a conga player, a revolutionary, a resident of Tahiti, all
the things Brando had been or had fantasized being. He
speaks about his childhood:
Months afterward, at a screening of Tango in New York, a
friend asked him:
Brando looked at him very coldly and answered, "You've
never really hated, have you? When you hate like I do, you
have to suffer the pain."
The last time we see Paul and Jeanne together, he is washing
her in the bathtub, and she is telling him she has fallen in
love with a man and it's Paul. His response is to sodomize her
with the help of a stick of butter. In another scene, Paul sits
with his wife's corpse, surrounded with flowers, and he sobs.
Even in two hundred years, he will never be able to understand his wife's true nature: "I'll never know who you were."
This was the kind of risk-taking bravura performance
Brando's talent had always promised. Writes Foster Hirsch:
It was both
a fulfillment and a culmination. Who else but Brando could
have made himself look so pathetic as he dogtrots after Jeanne
into the grimy tango palace and clowns and pleads:
And who else but Brando could have
imagined the gesture he makes at the end of the film, right
after Jeanne shoots him? He takes the chewing gum out of
his mouth and sticks it to the railing of the balcony before
dying.
At the wrap party, when Tango finished filming in April,
Brando confided to Bertolucci that he would never again
make a film like this one, that he didn't like acting at the best
of times, but in this one he had felt violated every moment,
every day. He even felt that his children were being torn away
from him. Informing his agent, Robert French, that he would
not be needing him anymore, he escaped to the beaches of
French Polynesia with Christian and Tarita.
She went on to say that Brando had dug deep and fused more in
a role than any other actor. He had "a direct pipeline to the
mysteries of character."
Italian censors also helped the movie become an international cause celebre. Obscenity charges were filed in
Bologna against Bertolucci, Brando, Schneider, and United
Artists, alleging: "obscene content...offensive to public
decency, and characterized by exasperating pan sexualism for
its own end, catering to the lowest instincts of the libido,"
and on and on. Not even a publicist for United Artists could
have written such an enticing blurb for the film.
Brando refused to defend Last Tango and remained in
French Polynesia, but Bertolucci appeared in court to argue
for its merits, and his lawyer stated:
The three Italian judges hearing the case agreed with the
defense. The filmmakers were acquitted.
By the start of 1973 Last Tango was released in theaters in Italy
and elsewhere. Its notoriety helped its box-office appeal, and
by the time the film opened in New York in February, it had
more than one hundred thousand dollars in advance sales.
The Kael review (which Brando thought was vastly
exaggerated), plus fulsome cover stories in both Time and
Newsweek, prompted negative reviews from other critics,
who called the movie "a piece of talented debauchery. It
makes you want to vomit." One joked, "It gives butter a bad
name." Last Tango went on to become the biggest money-
maker in the history of United Artists, and Brando became a
rich man all over again.
The movie had opened smack in the middle of the so-called sexual revolution. Feminism was blossoming; the gay rights movement was on the rise; there were nude encounter
groups and sex clubs and open marriages. Last Tango followed
on the heels of such other controversial films as Carnal Knowledge, Midnight Cowboy,
and A Clockwork Orange. Last Tango
seemed to glorify the idea that sex can be impersonal; sex is
no longer sacred or even dangerous. Many feminists loathed
the movie and thought it was chauvinistic. But critic Molly
Haskell pointed out that:
Brando refused most requests for interviews. He would
do no real publicity for the movie; he wanted to remain in
Polynesia, and he returned to Los Angeles in mid-February
only because Wally Cox died suddenly, and he flew back for
the memorial.
THE GODFATHER MARKED Marlon Brando's comeback, but there is
no simple explanation for the splendid zenith of Last Tango
in Paris—just a series of coincidences and perfect timing: the
right phone call from an old friend, Luigi Luraschi, who
headed Paramount's Rome office and who told him that director Bernardo Bertolucci had an intriguing idea for a movie.
Brando's trusted secretary, Alice Marchak, urged him to check
out the idea.
"Where his full art is realized. Intuitive, rapt, princely, on the screen Brando is our genius,
just as surely as Norman Mailer is our genius in literature."
"I had at my
disposal a great actor, with all the technical experience any
director would require. But I also had a mysterious man
waiting to be discovered in all the richness of his personal
material."
That fall Brando was supposed to star in Child's Play in New
York. He thought he had got a part in it for Wally Cox, but
then Cox told him he had to audition. The movie was to be
directed by Sidney Lumet, but after many disagreements,
Brando was fired.
The use of Francis Bacon paintings in Last Tango was no
afterthought. In October 1971, during pre-production in Paris,
Bertolucci saw a major exhibit of Bacon paintings at Le Grand
Palais. Two stood out for him, and they were eventually used
in the title sequences and serve as a metaphor for the movie.
The first is a portrait of a bearded and lecherous man on a
red divan, against yellow and white walls. He is clad in a white
undershirt, as Brando will be in several scenes. The second is
a study for a portrait of a woman seated on a wooden chair
in a white top and a brown skirt. She wears ugly wooden
oxfords and cannot seem to meet our gaze. She could be
Jeanne, the young girl in the movie, after she has murdered
Paul, and she appears depleted and confused. At the bottom
of the portrait is the shadow of a rat. The rat will turn up in
Paul's apartment, and Brando will later swing a dead rat in
Jeanne's face. It is the symbol of their decaying relationship.
"In Bacon, you see people throwing up their guts and
then doing a makeup job with their own vomit. Marlon is like one of the figures in the Bacon
painting. Everything shows up in his face. He
has the same devastated plasticity."
"She was a little Lolita, only more perverse."
"Is it difficult for you to look someone
in the eye for a long time?" he demanded.
The opening sequence of Last Tango takes place on the Pont
de Bir-Hakeim, which Bertolucci had used in the first scene
of The Conformist. It crosses the Seine south of the Eiffel
Tower and west of the city and has two levels, with Metro
trains traveling overhead from an elevated station. Our first
glimpse of Brando is as he screams out, "FUCKING GOD!"
against the roar of the train above him. The mad rush of
those trains throughout the movie is a reminder of his frequent rushes of emotion.
"the scream was Marlon's idea. He started at such a violent
pitch, I thought, 'I cannot work with this actor.' My fear lasted
all that week. Then Marlon said he was feeling the same thing
about me. From then on, everything went very well."
"We're going to forget
everything we know. No names, nothing. Everything outside
this place is bullshit."
"Marlon's forgetfulness was deliberate. He
uses the sense of danger that comes from forgetting dialogue
as a means of heightening his dramatic powers."
"Bernardo went around telling everybody the movie was
about the reincarnation of my prick. Now what the fuck does
that mean?"
"Bertolucci was in love with Marlon Brando, and that's what the
movie was about. We were acting out Bernardo's sex problems, in effect trying to transfer them to the film."
"And I am not ashamed. I've never paid attention to what people said about me. Deep down, I feel ambiguous....Sex somehow lacks precision. Let's say sex is sexless"
"Bernardo wanted me to fuck Maria. But I told him that was impossible. If that happens, our sex organs become the centerpiece
of the film. He didn't agree with me."
"Brando's cock up Schneider's real vagina would have
brought the history of cinema one huge march closer to the
ultimate experience it has promised since its inception—that
is, to embody life."
A month into the shooting of Last Tango, Brando's lawyer,
Norman Garey, phoned to tell him that Kashfi (Brando's ex-wife) had spirited
Christian away to Mexico, and the boy had disappeared.
Brando interpreted this as a kidnapping, and he flew back to
the United States immediately and hired a detective and a
man from Interpol to locate his boy.
"After a very long time in too many indifferent or half-realized
movies...Marlon Brando has finally connected with a character and a film....His performance...is true and flamboyant and, at unexpected moments, extremely moving. This is
not only because the emotions, if surcharged, are genuine
and fundamental, but also because we're watching a fine
actor exercise his talent for what looks like the great joy of
it."
"His performance in The Godfather cannot be dismissed as merely technical acting. But it
clearly derives from observation and imagination...and so
represents the glorious culmination of his effort...to become
the new Paul Muni, hiding behind accents and make-up."
"It was sometimes difficult to separate him from the character."
"Bertolucci was
pushing him, but once...you've scarred yourself over a period
of time, and you know what you're doing, it's very easy to
improvise."
"He
got caught up in how much he hated his father, and even
though he felt invaded, he continued the performance."
"My father was a drunk, tough,
whore-fucker, bar-fighter supermasculine, and he was tough.
My mother was very, very poetic, and also a drunk....All my
memories of when I was a kid was of her being arrested, nude.
We lived in this small town, a farming community....I'd come
home after school....She'd be gone, in jail or something...and
then I used to have to milk a cow every morning and every
night, and I liked that. But I remember one time I was all
dressed up to go out and take this girl to a basketball
game...and my father said, 'You have to milk the cow.' I asked
him 'Would you please milk it for me?' And he said, 'No. Get
your ass out there.' I...was in a hurry, didn't have time to
change my shoes, and I had cow shit all over my shoes...it
smelled in the car....I can't remember very many things "
"Marlon, why didn't you just wipe the cow
shit off your shoes? You had enough time to do that."
"It's as if we're seeing the purest kind of Method acting, a showcase of how an actor
draws on his own resources of memory, anger, and anxiety
to create a character. Brando didn't
transform his emotional reality into a fiction. He simply
revealed a dark side of himself, so the film is finally, on one
level, about what it is like to be Marlon Brando."
"What the hell! I'm no prize....I got a prostate as big as an Idaho
potato, but I'm still a good stick man. I don't have any friends,
and I suppose if I hadn't met you, I'd be ready for a hard chair
and a hemorrhoid."
In the fall of 1972, Last Tango in Paris was screened for one
night at the New York Film Festival. It created a sensation
and inspired Pauline Kael to write ecstatically in The New
Yorker, Last Tango in Paris is:
"the most powerfully erotic film ever made. People will be arguing about it for years."
"Marlon Brando personifies the fall of man. This is the message of Tango....The
beast inside Marlon may be inside us too, but we are cowards
and try to suffocate it."
"in surrendering her body without
strings, Maria Schneider had a better chance of ultimately
freeing her mind. Schneider's journey into her entrails, under
Brando's instruction, is terrifying. But if she survives, she has
a better chance of possessing her life than ever before."
Oscars:
