The Missouri Breaks
As shape-shifting, lavender-scented 'regulator' Robert E. Lee Clayton, Marlon Brando delivers the most self-indulgent performance of his career, and that's saying a lot
Reviewed by Steve Uhler, Fri., Nov. 25, 2005
THE MISSOURI BREAKS
MGM Home Video, $14.95
"All I know is," drawls doomed Little Todd (an impossibly young Randy Quaid in one of his patented rube roles), "life is like nothin' I ever seen before." And nothing he'll ever see again. By the next morning, the likable horse thief will have been nonchalantly dispatched to his maker by the most bizarre and sadistic assassin ever to graduate from the Method school of murder. As shape-shifting, lavender-scented "regulator" Robert E. Lee Clayton, Marlon Brando delivers the most self-indulgent performance of his career, and that's saying a lot: loonier than his Kabuki-faced Dr. Moreau, deadlier than his demented Col. Kurtz, as foppishly fey as his prissy Fletcher Christian. The effete but lethal Clayton is fond of adopting different disguises – frontier granny, brogue-spouting Irish priest – and luring his victims into his deadly traps like a spider in heat. Brando allegedly spent more creative energy on the set mooning his fellow cast members than learning his lines, but his off-the-cuff improvs are entertaining. Lambasted by critics upon its release, The Missouri Breaks is one of those love-it-or-loathe-it cult classics that spark barroom shoot-'em-ups among cineastes. Director Arthur Penn already knew a thing about helming revisionist Westerns when he took on the project. He'd directed 1958's The Left Handed Gun with Paul Newman as Billy the Kid (perhaps the world's first existentialist Western) and, on a grander scale, 1970's Little Big Man. Like Penn's earlier Bonnie and Clyde, The Missouri Breaks queasily mixes high comedy with bursts of disturbing violence. The film's real appeal – and calamitous undoing – was the much-ballyhooed pairing of Brando and Jack Nicholson. They share precious little screen time, and, when they do, the deferential Nicholson pales next to his mentor's hammy flamboyance. Still, Brando's inventiveness makes The Missouri Breaks one of cinema's most compulsively watchable train wrecks: It's not a pretty picture, but just try to turn away.
