Clashes of the Titans

"There were giants in the earth in those days…"
Genesis 6:4


Introduction

In the midst of the 1988 Winter Olympics, gold medalist skier Alberto Tomba of Italy announced to the press, and thus the world, that he had a crush on the beautiful German figure skater Katarina Witt. Nicknamed "La Bomba" and "Elvis on Skis," he was the most decorated Alpine skier in Olympic history.

Proclaiming, "If she doesn’t win a gold medal, I will give her one of mine," Tomba sent Witt a bouquet of roses, as well as an autographed poster of himself, adorned with his own sketch of a heart.

As fate would have it, Witt indeed landed a gold medal. The much anticipated meeting of the two icons of the hibernal games, attracting a media blitz worthy of the Yalta Conference between FDR, Churchill and Stalin, took place at the foot of a slalom in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and produced as much heat as a spent match tossed into wet snow. Awkward exchanges were separated by even more uncomfortable silences.

Witt would later state that, although "he is a fun guy," they "never went out. We met a couple of times very briefly. He hardly spoke English at the time."

In the moviehouse, two people speaking different languages is, more often than not, the result when two individuals of prodigious talent are paired onscreen in what may have initially seemed a surefire shortcut to box-office bonanza.

"My Little Chickadee"

W.C. Fields and Mae West had been bankable stars on their own for Paramount in the early 1930s, when they were, in the words of The Art of W.C. Fields author William K. Everson, "too big to appear together." By the time the two stars migrated to Universal Pictures, "both had been slipping at the box office, their pictures becoming more infrequent." Fields’ grandson, Ronald J. Fields, author of W.C. Fields: A Life on Film, agreed that "West’s career was just edging into eclipse after a meteoric rise," but maintained that his grandfather "was still riding a popular tide." Everson noted, "Mae West had especially suffered from the increasingly stringent restrictions placed on her by the Production Code."

Universal’s "Destry Rides Again" (1939), a comedy western that teamed screen veteran Marlene Dietrich with a young, laid-back James Stewart (above), inspired the studio to try to duplicate the successful formula by casting Fields and West in a similar setting. Universal had been concerned about Fields’ ability to carry a movie on his own when he was previously paired with ventriloquist Edgar Bergen (and his dummy Charlie McCarthy) in "You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man," so the notion of pitting him against the bawdy West seemed a sound one.

At this stage in their careers, both Fields and West enjoyed the privilege of writing their own lines, resulting in a surprisingly smooth, harmonious collaboration which continued during production. If there was any conflict, it was in Fields’ traditional contention with studio heads and hack script writers.

"My Little Chickadee" (1940) was a box office hit, but Mae West was not the critics’ favorite. "Destry Rides Again" proved to be a notable comeback opportunity for Marlene Dietrich, providing her with a new career. "My Little Chickadee," which, for West, represented a shot at interesting Universal in a second motion picture with lucrative terms, ended up an embarrassing comedown. The option the studio had on a follow-up film was never pursued.

Simon Louvish, author of Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W.C. Fields, noted, "Mae West always promised more than she delivered, and Fields played a man who could no longer deliver anything, but swept through life as if he had it all. While women admired Mae West’s self-sufficiency in a world of male power, men, particularly in the wake of the Depression, responded to the air of male helplessness that Fields represented."

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In time, Mae West trashed "My Little Chickadee" and, in particular, W.C. Fields, although he was, in fact, never less than thoughtful and attentive to her in return. Long after his death, she made the unlikely claim that she, being a well-known teetotaler, had her costar escorted off the set due to his drunkenness. Her biggest beef, after all, was that Fields was billed alongside her as a script writer. Erroneously stating that she allowed him to "write one little scene himself," she detested sharing the writing credit with him, even though he permitted her name to come first. "I think it’s a good picture," she sniffed, "but Bill Fields got co-script credit, which was a farce."

In her later years, she was often asked more about this movie than any other in her career. "Some people have gotten the quaint idea that I made more than one film with W.C. Fields," she commented in 1970. "No way, baby. Once was enough."

According to Ronald J. Fields, West did not "allow anyone to talk about (Fields) in her presence until the day she died." When Ronald J. Fields was promoting his 1973 book W.C. Fields by Himself on TV and radio, West declined the invitation to join him at a Los Angeles station, explaining, "I don’t want to meet another Fields as long as I live."

"Vera Cruz"

Two of Hollywood’s most virile leading men, Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper, the former in his prime, the latter in his twilight, shared the screen in "Vera Cruz" (1954), a fast-paced tale of a stoic, reserved ex-Confederate (Cooper) who teams with a flamboyant, roguish outlaw (Lancaster), and his motley gang of cutthroats (including Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam and Charles Bronson), to steal a cache of gold from the French army occupying Mexico following the American Civil War.

Amoral, nihilistic, randomly violent and downright fun, presaging Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns with Clint Eastwood, "Vera Cruz" exploited director Robert Aldrich’s fondness for "an endlessly inventive game of one-upmanship," as noted by Edwin T. Arnold and Eugene L. Miller, authors of The Films and Career of Robert Aldrich. "There are exaggerations, improbabilities, implausibilities, reversals and variations throughout."

Cooper had picked up the Best Actor Academy Award for "High Noon" the previous year. Clark Gable, who had seen Burt Lancaster’s Oscar-nominated performance in "From Here to Eternity," advised Cooper to turn down the role opposite the younger actor in "Vera Cruz," saying, "That young fella will wipe you off the map." When it came to contrasting their performing styles, Lancaster later recalled, "There I was, acting my ass off. I looked like an idiot, and Cooper was absolutely marvelous."

As it turned out, any real conflict on the set was between Lancaster, whose production company was backing the film, and director Aldrich, who regarded this as a major development in his career. Evelyn Harvey, writing for Collier’s magazine, commented, "From sunup to sundown, Lancaster was a one-man tornado, directing camera angles, fussing over details of script, makeup, music, wardrobe." Aldrich, who would go on to make box-office hits the likes of "The Dirty Dozen" and "The Longest Yard," lamented at the time, "When you’re directing your first great picture, you don’t welcome somebody else…with directorial notions."

Cooper was uncharacteristically vocal about his dislike for his costar, Sara Montiel, a 26-year-old Spanish actress cast as the 53-year-old actor’s unlikely love interest. He complained that she never washed her hair (according to her hairdresser, she merely added olive oil to her tresses daily) and claimed she smelled so bad he couldn’t bear kissing her.

"What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?"

Nearly a decade later, Robert Aldrich directed another pair of Hollywood legends, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" (1962), a deliriously grotesque melodrama about two sisters, both long-forgotten movie stars, locked in a twisted sadomasochistic relationship. Think Billy Wilder’s "Sunset Blvd" meets Hitchcock’s "Psycho."

It was no secret that the two actresses disliked each other, before, during and after production. For one scene that required Davis to struggle with Crawford (whose character was a crippled invalid), Davis kicked her costar in the head, resulting in stitches. When the script required Davis to drag Crawford’s limp body, the latter hid weights in her clothes, and Davis suffered a strained back.

Crawford’s late husband had been CEO of Pepsi, while she herself maintained a position on the company’s board of directors. During filming, "someone" put Coca-Cola into the Pepsi vending machine on the set, driving her to confront Aldrich and demand, "Will you get that other soft drink out of there right now?"

Come Oscar time, Crawford was incensed when Davis was nominated over her for an Academy Award. Crawford allegedly contacted other Best Actress nominees who would be unable to attend the ceremonies, volunteering to accept the award on their behalf. When the absent Anne Bancroft was declared the winner for her role in "The Miracle Worker," Crawford barreled past Davis, declaring, "Step aside!" and triumphantly picked up the statuette. Davis later said, "It would have meant a million more dollars to our film if I had won. Joan was thrilled I hadn’t."

"The Towering Inferno"

In 1956, Steve McQueen was cast in his first film with a bit part in "Somebody Up There Likes Me," starring Paul Newman as real-life boxing legend Rocky Graziano, a role originally intended for James Dean. "It was at this point that McQueen began using Newman as a measuring stick for his success," according to Marshall Terrill, author of Steve McQueen: Portrait of an American Rebel, "and it would take him 19 years to catch up."

After Newman turned it down, the romantic lead in "Love with the Proper Stranger" (1963), costarring Natalie Wood, went to McQueen. Likewise, it took Newman’s refusal that led to McQueen’s starring role in "The Sand Pebbles" (1966) and his only Oscar nominated performance. It was rumored that McQueen would play Sundance in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," but Newman allegedly balked at the possibility of being upstaged by him.

"The Towering Inferno" (1974), an all-star disaster epic directed by Irwin Allen, who virtually invented the genre as the producer of "The Poseidon Adventure," was a historical collaboration between two major Hollywood studios and was, as well, the long anticipated teaming of Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. McQueen was originally offered Newman’s role of the architect but, fortified by the box-office clout he earned from "The Getaway" and "Papillon," felt the part of the fire chief offered more heroic challenges.

The competition between the two actors, who share only three scenes, was seemingly demonstrated in their exuberance to perform several of their own stunts. McQueen, upon learning that Newman had 12 more lines in the script, demanded that they each have exactly the same amount of dialogue. The rivalry continued with the dilemma of marquee billing for the stars, which was resolved by displaying both names side by side, McQueen’s on the left, with Newman’s name slightly higher on the right.

McQueen biographer Marshall Terrill noted, "Newman may have had more range as an actor, but it is McQueen who emerges as the star of ‘The Towering Inferno.’ And it is McQueen who became the undisputed king of Hollywood. He had no more worlds to conquer." Having finally bested his longtime rival, McQueen oddly disappeared for a few years, finally re-emerging as the star and executive producer of an obscure vanity project, "An Enemy of the People" (1978), based on Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play about social and political intolerance. He would star in only two more films, "Tom Horn" and "The Hunter," both commercial and critical disappointments, before his death at the end of 1980.

"The Undefeated"

Riding tall in the saddle after his blustery performance in "True Grit" earned John Wayne a Best Actor Oscar (arguably more of a sentimental victory - not the first or last time Academy voters gave in to a nostalgic favorite - than a claim to thespian superiority), the Duke mounted up in a series of forgettable westerns, all interchangeably routine and mundanely predictable, including "Chisum," "Rio Lobo," "The Train Robbers" and "Cahill, United States Marshal."

Certainly not the least remarkable, but still by-the-numbers, "The Undefeated" (1969) brings together Confederate and Union soldiers in an uneasy alliance on a horse drive into revolution-torn Mexico. Hoping to team John Wayne with Rock Hudson, Twentieth Century-Fox allegedly offered Wayne a lucrative contract that granted him complete creative control.

In the 2003 book John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth, Michael Munn, an author whose Hollywood biographies often came under critical scrutiny for dubious authenticity, quoted Hudson as saying, "I was grateful to Duke Wayne because my career was going down the toilet at that time…He saved my life back when no other filmmaker wanted to know me." In fact, Hudson’s flagging career had received a big shot in the arm a year earlier with a starring role in the 1968 box-office hit "Ice Station Zebra," a Cold War action thriller, which, interestingly, became a favorite of shut-in billionaire Howard Hughes, who repeatedly watched the film again and again in his private hotel suite in his final years.

It was a fact that all of Hollywood was aware of Hudson’s homosexuality, while most filmgoers were kept in the dark until his own disclosure in 1985 that he was dying of AIDS. Leery of homophobia, he was initially hesitant about costarring with Wayne, an actor who personified American machismo. As it turned out, each man discovered the other was an excellent bridge player, an evening pastime they enjoyed frequently while on location in Durango, Mexico, and they became, in Hudson’s words, "great friends." Hudson later recalled, "What crap the film was, but what a great time I had making it."

In her biography of her husband, Pilar Wayne recalled asking him what he thought of Hudson’s homosexuality. He answered, "What Rock Hudson does, in the privacy of his own room, is his own business. He’s a professional on the set and a real gentleman - and he plays a hell of a hand of bridge." During an afternoon of filming, as Hudson performed for the camera, Wayne commented to his 14-year-old daughter Aissa, "Look at that face. What a waste of a face on a queer. You know what I could have done with that face?"

"Rooster Cogburn"

Six years after "The Undefeated," John Wayne was paired with another Hollywood legend, the inimitable Katharine Hepburn, in what would be his second-to-last motion picture, "Rooster Cogburn" (1975), an inconsequential sequel, in part, to the popular "True Grit" but, mostly, a shameless rehash of "The African Queen," with an aging Wayne replacing Humphrey Bogart as the boozing, salty-tongued loner who charms Hepburn’s prim spinster and, of course, is charmed by her in return.

Despite forecasts of a stormy set, precipitated by Wayne’s conservative politics clashing with Hepburn’s liberal nature, "a love of movies and life, of laughter and camaraderie, brought them together," as noted by authors Randy Roberts and James S. Olson in John Wayne: American. "She found him polite, sensitive, talented and considerate, a real gentleman." Hepburn said, "He’s a very, very good actor, in the highest sense of the word."

For his part, Wayne vocally admired her determination. "She’s so feminine," he remarked, "she’s a man’s woman. I imagine how she must have been at age 25 or 30…how lucky a man would have been to have found her."

During one break for lunch, Hepburn mentioned to producer Hal Wallis, "I love working with Duke, but he tells everyone what to do, bosses everyone around, and I’m the one who usually gets to do that. Now I don’t get to." Wallis dryly replied, "The next time he acts as if he knows everything, remind him of ‘The Alamo’ and ‘The Green Berets.’"

Near filming’s end, Wayne purportedly gathered Hepburn up in a bear-like embrace and planted a kiss on her speechless lips, bellowing, "Damn! There’s a woman!" When she caught her breath, she exclaimed, "What a wonderful experience. He’s one hell of an actor."

Although the two men weren’t friends, John Wayne had, for the most part, been "encouraging and supportive" of Clint Eastwood, as noted by Richard Schickel in his 1996 biography of Eastwood. "Dropping into the dead-on vocal impersonation of the older actor he sometimes does," Schickel wrote, "Clint recalls Wayne saying to him more than once, ‘We ought to work together, kid.’" Eastwood once sent a screenplay for such a project to Wayne, but the latter thought that the script needed too much work.

One can only wonder now what such a teaming would have resulted in, although it is interesting to note that in 1974, the 67-year-old Wayne trespassed into Eastwood’s "Dirty Harry" territory when he starred as a rogue cop in "McQ." While Harry wielded a .44 Magnum ("the most powerful handgun in the world"), the Duke one-upped him with a hand-held MAC-10 submachine gun with a revolutionary sound suppressor.

"Where Eagles Dare"

Soon after his breakthrough performances in the so-called "Man with No Name" trilogy of Italian westerns, and following starring roles stateside in "Hang ‘Em High" and "Coogan’s Bluff," Clint Eastwood got his "first glimpse of grand-scale international celebrity," according to Richard Schickel, when he met his costar for the World War II action picture "Where Eagles Dare" (1969). Richard Burton, five years after his performance in "Cleopatra" and four years into his first marriage to Elizabeth Taylor, was at the peak of his stardom. Right off the bat, Burton and Taylor invited Eastwood to join them in the bar for drinks, the first of several such occasions and the start of what proved to be, more or less, a friendly working relationship.

Both stars claimed that they had signed on for "Where Eagles Dare" because the other was doing it. Burton also said he wanted to do a movie that he could take his children to, but it was widely believed that he took the role solely for the money. According to Schickel, "It made sense for (Burton) to work with a rising action star in a picture that had no artistic pretense and appealed to the male audience; by so doing he might establish himself in what amounted to a new field…"

For Burton, however, "Where Eagles Dare" turned out to be an end, not the beginning, to his brief reign as a major movie star. "This was (Eastwood’s) kind of picture, not Burton’s," according to Schickel. Eastwood "was doing what he could to ease his colleague’s way. It was, Clint quickly observed, booze, more than the rigors of production, from which Burton needed protection. His capacity for it was, to Clint, amazing. As was his ability, most of the time, to carry on without visible effects - ‘just one eye sagging a little, but that’s about it.’"

Actress Ingrid Pitt, who portrayed Heidi, a German barmaid (above left), observed, "Clint and Richard Burton were so different. Clint was looking forward to the rest of his career. He was watching everything…Richard Burton was just drinking and spouting Shakespeare. He was unhappy. He drank…he was just tired of living."

"City Heat"

Flashback to October of 1955, when three actors were unceremoniously released from their contracts with Universal Pictures: Clint Eastwood, David Janssen and Burt Reynolds. In his 1994 memoir, Reynolds wrote, "According to the studio, Clint’s Adam’s apple stuck out too far, David’s ears were too big, and me…they said, ‘You can’t act.’ I told Clint he was in a hell of a lot of trouble, I could always learn to act someday, but he could never get rid of that damn Adam’s apple."

David Janssen, of course, went on to become a major television star in the hit 1960s series "The Fugitive," and more than two decades after their brusque dismissal, Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds shared a Time magazine cover story, proclaiming them "Hollywood's Honchos" and adorning them with the mantle of "Everyman" that once belonged to James Stewart and Henry Fonda. Time contributing writer Richard Schickel extolled, "In today’s climate, it may actualy take more courage and more imagination to become an Eastwood or a Reynolds than it does to be a Nicholson or a Redford."

In the prologue to his biography of Eastwood, Schickel recounted that Reynolds and Eastwood "were friends at the time…Reynolds was the kind of guy Clint loved hanging out with - bright, funny, articulate…That he was an actor who would soon blight his career by making all the mistakes Clint avoided - he began parodying himself and in his efforts to get chummy with the public let them in on too many of his mysteries - was not yet clear."

Blake Edwards’ track record as a screenwriter-director included a number of Hollywood hits, including "Breakfast at Tiffany’s," "Days of Wine and Roses," the "Pink Panther" series of films starring Peter Sellers, "10," "S.O.B." (a dark satire of studio politics that featured a much talked-about topless scene by Edwards’ wife, Julie Andrews) and "Victor/Victoria." He had written a script in the early 1980s called "Kansas City Jazz," a buddy comedy about a cop and a private eye who run up against gangsters in ‘30s Kansas City. In what was called a "pussy-footin’" ploy to get Eastwood on board, Edwards asked Clint’s then-girlfriend (and frequent costar) Sondra Locke (below) to read the screenplay, short of promising her a lead role, while subtly suggesting she let Eastwood read the script.

"Before I knew it," Locke said, as recounted in Burt Reynolds’ autobiography, "Blake and his wife, Julie Andrews, were having dinner with Clint and me. Then Burt Reynolds was suddenly brought in, and within a few weeks, I was simply out of the mix and forgotten."

Edwards’ script, according to Schickel, "had something of the air of those quick, tough little movies Warner Brothers used to make about once a month in the thirties, which Clint had always enjoyed." However, it wasn’t long in the pre-production process before the painstakingly drawn-out approach of Edwards (Eastwood referred to him as "that windy bastard") rubbed against Eastwood’s "just-do-it" style, and the studio fired Edwards over "creative differences," handing the project, now titled "City Heat," over to Eastwood’s production company, Malpaso, which would share credit with Reynolds’ company, Deliverance.

(For the screenplay credit, Blake Edwards removed his name and used the pseudonym Sam O. Brown, the initials referring to his earlier film, "S.O.B." Edwards later recalled that the experience "broke my heart. I had close to a breakdown." Burt Reynolds said that Edwards "never got over it." Edwards’ subsequent résumé included the comedic misfires "A Fine Mess," teaming Ted Danson with Howie Mandel, "Blind Date," starring Bruce Willis and Kim Basinger, "Skin Deep," featuring John Ritter, and "Switch!" with Ellen Barkin and Jimmy Smits.)

The two stars of "City Heat" replaced director Edwards with Richard Benjamin, a once popular actor ("Goodbye, Columbus," "Catch-22," "Westworld") who had recently directed the well-received period comedy "My Favorite Year," starring Peter O’Toole.

The opening scene in "City Heat," a brawl in a diner, was the first scene shot, and a stuntman broke Reynolds’ jaw by picking up a metal chair instead of a breakaway prop. As a result, Reynolds suffered temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ), a condition that threw off his control of balance. According to Richard Benjamin, Reynolds became "distracted," nervous and apprehensive in action sequences. He began relying on the painkiller Percodan and subsisted on a liquid diet because of his injured jaw. His weight loss during production sparked rumors that he had AIDS.

"City Heat" ended up, in Richard Schickel’s words, "a largely agreeable, entirely forgettable movie that did not deliver the sizzle, buzz and blockbuster grosses the studio had expected." "Ultimately, I blame myself for the picture’s disappointing performance," Burt Reynolds wrote. "(Eastwood’s) natural rhythm required me to counterpunch with a certain energy…I had to dance while he stood still…But I didn’t have it, and that’ll always be one of my biggest regrets." He maintained that "just trying to stand upright and not vomit consumed all my concentration then…I just wanted to finish the film, so I could spend whatever conscious moments I had at home battling the constant pain, nausea, and ringing in my ears."

"The heat promised by the movie’s title rarely climbs higher than lukewarm," Schickel commented. "If we had stopped trying to incorporate every subplot and instead stayed with the (Spencer) Tracy-(Clark) Gable relationship in ‘Boomtown,’" Reynolds complained, "I believe our core audience would have loved the picture. They didn’t give a shit about the kissing crap as much as they wanted to watch Clint and me go at it…and then get together and beat the shit out of everyone in sight."

"Harlem Nights"

"There is a time in the career of every superstar when he seems able to do no wrong. Sometimes that is the very moment when he is sowing the seeds of his downfall. Look at Burt Reynolds, who rode to the top in a series of dumb movies that destroyed his bankability." So wrote Roger Ebert in his review of "Harlem Nights" (1989), starring and directed by Eddie Murphy, flush from his success in two "Beverly Hills Cop" films and "Coming to America."

Like Eastwood, Eddie Murphy was a fan of gangster movies and always wanted to do a period picture of his own. The production also fulfilled a dream of his to work with the man he regarded as his greatest influence in standup comedy, Richard Pryor. Pryor had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1986, and in "Harlem Nights," the effects of the illness are painfully evident in his stiff and carefully mannered actions.

Pryor and Murphy portray a father and adopted son who run a nightclub in the late 1930s despite strong-arm intimidation from white mobsters and crooked cops. The film attempts to be a celebration of three generations of African American comedians, with Redd Foxx appearing as the elder statesman of the cast, but the result, in Ebert’s words, is "an uninspired cross between ‘Cotton Club’ and the characters of Damon Runyon, told in clichés so broad you keep waiting for it to poke fun at itself, but it never does." Remarkably mean-spirited, "Harlem Nights" drops over 130 f-bombs and its derivatives.

Ultimately, Ebert called the film "a costume party in which everybody gets to look great, while fumbling through a plot that has not been fresh since at least 1938." Murphy himself would admit that he didn’t devote enough time, thought and care to directing the picture because he was more concerned about where the next party was going to be.

"The Last Tycoon"

"The Last Tycoon" (1975) was playwright Harold Pinter’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last, unfinished novel, about Monroe Stahr, a workaholic studio chief in 1930s Hollywood, based in no small part on "Boy Wonder" producer Irving Thalberg. Originally, Mike Nichols was slated to direct Jack Nicholson as Stahr, but when Elia Kazan ("A Streetcar Named Desire," "On the Waterfront") took over as director, he wanted Robert De Niro as the "thin, somewhat sickly Jew with erudition and culture," in Kazan’s words. Following powerful performances in "Taxi Driver" and "The Godfather Part II," De Niro was in the forefront among a new generation of actors as a rival to Nicholson.

Nicholson did appear in "The Last Tycoon," in a cameo as a leftist labor organizer who meets with De Niro to avert a writers’ strike. The highly anticipated sequence shared by the two actors is brief. In the biography Jack’s Life, author Patrick McGilligan wrote, "Deliberate and controlled, in the style of the film, they ooze their dialogue as they size each other up." The highlight is an intensely competitive ping-pong duel, after which an inebriated De Niro, who has been Red-baiting Nicholson, ends up getting cold-cocked. ("I always wanted to hit ten million dollars," Nicholson’s character says.) "They were privileged scenes," McGilligan commented, "in an underrated and elegant film," which proved to be the last movie directed by Kazan.

"The Missouri Breaks"

Far from such understated elegance was the pairing of Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando in "The Missouri Breaks" (1976). After "slouching through parodies of himself" in the 1960s, according to Brando biographer Peter Manso, the actor enjoyed a newfound bankability with roles in "The Godfather" and "Last Tango in Paris" and, in Manso’s words, "became known as a fast-buck cameo man." While he was supposedly reluctant to perform on-camera, Brando needed money to support his "families," to fund Tetiaroa (his personal, 13-islet Tahitian atoll which he bought after making "Mutiny on the Bounty"), to contribute to Native American causes, as well as to underwrite a film he wanted to make about Indians. So he signed to appear in two motion pictures. "The Missouri Breaks" would eventually earn him $16.5 million, and "Superman" would bring him $15 million for 15 minutes of onscreen and voice-over time.

Directed by Arthur Penn ("Bonnie and Clyde"), "The Missouri Breaks" is a revisionist western that features Jack Nicholson as the likeable leader of a gang of horse rustlers (including Harry Dean Stanton and Randy Quaid) and Brando as a loopy Civil War veteran hired by a rancher to eradicate the outlaws. "It wasn’t a good movie," Brando recalled in his memoir, Songs My Mother Taught Me, "but I had fun making it. There was a lot of pot smoking and partying, my friend Jack Nicholson was in it, and much of the picture was filmed on the Crow Reservation in Montana."

As a sign of things to come, Brando at first suggested Nicholson play his role as a Native American, but then again no, Brando wanted to make his character an Indian. Frustrated screenwriter Thomas McGuane said, "How do you make a former Confederate border ruffian-turned-contract killer into an Indian good guy?"

In his autobiography, Brando noted that director Penn "encouraged us to improvise. I was supposed to play…a ‘regulator,’ a hired gun who went around the West assassinating people, and it was so boring that I decided to make changes. First I played the part as an Englishman, then…made him an Irishman. I also played him…disguised as a woman…"

From the onset, associate producer Marion Rosenberg was aware that Brando "had decided to push the limit. Like his dumb Irish accent. That came out when he said his first line. Once he established it, he had to keep using it, but nobody had the courage to say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, what are you doing?’…Behind his back, people were saying, ‘Is he crazy? We can’t use this shot!’ But nobody stood up to him."

One morning, Brando abruptly interrupted a shot to snatch a live frog from a river, take a large bite out of it and toss it back into the water. In another shot, he suddenly turned his rifle to take potshots at grasshoppers. When he deemed a particular bit of business wasn’t working, he up and drove off into the prairie dust on his trail bike, prompting Nicholson to shrug and utter, "Oh, well, another day, another twenty-one grand."

As much as Brando looked forward to jazzing up his scenes, Nicholson, stuck with the burden of playing it straight to carry the remnants of a plot forward, was, according to the director, more secretive and experiential, with a desire to get on the set, shoot the scene and ride the tide. ("Poor old Jack," Brando later mused. "He was running around cranking the whole thing out while I’m zipping in and out like a firefly.") "Jack has got a certain something that’s dancing behind his eyes," Arthur Penn commented, "an idea or a secret, something that he’s picked up that informs his acting…Plus, he’s sneaky fast. He holds it in reserve, and you don’t see it coming…"

The original script contained only one scene in which Brando and Nicholson interact with each other. Deciding the movie required more of a confrontation between the two superstars, they, along with Penn, brainstormed and concocted the bizarre scene in which Brando is playing childishly with soap bubbles in a sudsy bathtub when Nicholson surprises him. According to author Peter Manso, the scene "was one of Brando’s larks that worked, if only because he camped it up with no reservations."

Critic Vincent Canby labeled Brando’s performance "out-of-control," observing that after a delayed entrance, he "spends the rest of the movie upstaging the writer, the director and the other actors." The film "too often seems like camp," because Brando’s antics have no "apparent connection to the movie that surrounds him." Author Brian Garfield, in Western Films, dubbed Brando’s character a "contemptible, self-indulgent caricature and belongs in some other movie." Garfield noted that "one can see his eyes drift toward the off-camera cue cards he uses because he’s too lazy to memorize his lines." (Nicholson complained to a writer for New York Magazine, "Marlon’s still the greatest actor in the world, so why does he need those goddamn cue cards?")

In a December 1976 interview for Cosmopolitan magazine, Nichoson admitted, "I was very hurt. The picture was terribly out of balance and I said so. Well, an actor isn’t supposed to care…Arthur Penn doesn’t talk to me anymore because I told him I didn’t like his picture. The movie could’ve been saved in the cutting room, but nobody listened."

As for Brando, he told a friend he had no respect for Arthur Penn (who had directed him a decade earlier in a turgid melodrama, "The Chase," costarring Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, Angie Dickinson and Robert Duvall). He thought Penn "had one foot in each door - the establishment and the non-establishment," criticizing him for "wanting to be both commercial and artistic at the same time."

Brando had unkind words concerning his costar, as well, comparing Nicholson to "a pianist who has only one finger, playing on a piano that has only one note." Brando told an interviewer, "I actually don’t think he’s that bright, not as good as Robert De Niro, for example."

"The Score"

Marlon Brando’s final filmed role, and his first in several years, came in "The Score," a 2001 heist flick costarring Robert De Niro and Edward Norton. Shortly after Brando’s death in July 2004, David Edelstein, now chief film critic for New York Magazine, wrote in the online magazine Slate, "The announcement of the actor’s death at the age of 80 was a shock but not a surprise. The reclusive actor was massively obese and, reportedly, depressed. Over the last decade, he had seen his children come to unhappy ends. His last performance, in ‘The Score,’ was painful for reasons other than the film’s mediocrity. The meeting of two former Method Acting gods - Brando and Robert De Niro - was a nonevent. Brando sounded out of breath, and it was the first time he seemed to exploit his own torpor for pathos."

Interviewed for A.V. Club in August 2007, "The Score" director, Frank Oz (onetime Muppet puppeteer, the voice behind such beloved characters as Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear and "Sesame Street’s" Bert, as well as Yoda in the "Star Wars" saga, who went on to a successful career behind the camera as the director of such films as "Little Shop of Horrors," "What About Bob?", "Bowfinger" and the original "Death at a Funeral"), admitted that Brando "didn’t know who I was" and took the job "because of Bob (De Niro) and the money."

Oz said, "I prepared myself too well. I told myself…I would not let (Brando) take over. And I was just wrong. I was not nurturing…so we clashed very badly…Marlon was trying to make more of a statement in his acting, and I wouldn’t let him, and I was very tough. I should have been more nurturing, it was more my fault. But because I wasn’t, he hated me, and wouldn’t really let me direct him after that…Ninety percent of the time, he wouldn’t listen to me."

Brando, who had the habit of walking around the set naked, referred to Oz as "Fozzie" or "Miss Piggy." An unsubstantiated account quoted Brando telling Oz, "I bet you wish I was a puppet so you could stick your hand up my ass and make me do what you want." Eventually, De Niro directed Brando, with Oz feeding him instructions on a headset.

In the end, Oz stated, "I do believe I’m very happy with his performance because it was naturalistic…Sadly, Marlon was very unhappy about it." On the other hand, Oz claimed, "You can’t be that good and not enjoy it." He said, "I learned a great deal, that even the greatest actor in the world…is scared and needs nourishment. So it was a good sad lesson."

Reviewing "The Score" for The New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote, "There is always a morbid fascination in watching first-rate actors trundle through expensive pieces of Hollywood hackwork. Mr. Brando and Mr. De Niro have some amusing throwaway scenes together, as if to show the audience…that they are the right men for the job."

Keith Phipps, critic for A.V. Club, noted, "Burdened by the heightened expectations of their pairing, De Niro and Brando would practically have to paint ‘Guernica’ while tap-dancing to avoid disappointing. Instead, their scenes are pleasantly underplayed, creating a nice give-and-take that, inevitably, registers as an anticlimax."

"Righteous Kill"

"Righteous Kill" (2008) was looked forward to as the Robert De Niro-Al Pacino moment. A.V. Club reviewer Keith Phipps recalled that director Michael Mann’s "superb 1995 film ‘Heat’ starred Al Pacino as a cop locked into a game of cat-and-mouse with professional thief Robert De Niro. Apart from the action finale, the two icons have only one scene together, but what a scene. At a diner, they establish a cautious rapport rooted in a professional respect. In another life, where they weren’t required to kill each other, it might have blossomed into a friendship. For everything that divides them, the pair keeps stalking around something bigger that unites them."

Roger Ebert called it "a sequence…that illuminates the movie’s real subject." He noted, "Middle-aged, weary, with too much experience in their lines of work, they know exactly what they represent to one another, but for this moment of truce they drink their coffee…The cop says, ‘I don’t know how to do anything else.’ The thief says, ‘Neither do I.’ The scene concentrates the truth of ‘Heat,’ which is that cops and robbers need each other. They occupy the same space, sealed off from the mainstream of society, defined by its own rules."

For an interview to promote "Righteous Kill," Robert De Niro said, "In ‘Heat,’ we only had one scene together, which is my favorite scene…I thought it was well written and was a great scene to watch, so I wanted to build on that." A.V. Club’s Keith Phipps commented, "'Righteous Kill’ plays like a feature-length apology for that scene. Pacino and De Niro share a lot of time together, relying on the default personas they’ve ossified since ‘Heat.’ Pacino’s sardonic and verbal. De Niro is tight-lipped and intense…The novelty of watching De Niro and Pacino team up wears off pretty quickly." Another critic remarked, "Pacino and De Niro look totally spent."

These days, a filmgoer’s chance of seeing Hollywood power players share the same screen is in a picture that recruits several luminaries in an ensemble caper that may seem as if it was more fun for the cast than the audience. What comes to mind immediately are director Steven Soderbergh’s "Ocean’s" trilogy ("…Eleven," "…Twelve," "…Thirteen"), featuring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, Don Cheadle, Andy Garcia, Bernie Mac, Carl Reiner, Elliott Gould, and Al Pacino. And then there is the recent three-ring testosterone circus assembled by ringmaster Sylvester Stallone in "The Expendables," teaming him with Jason Statham, Jet Li, Randy Couture, Dolph Lundgren, Terry Crews, Mickey Rourke, and Steve Austin, not to mention, if only briefly, Stallone’s fellow Planet Hollywood maitre d’s Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger.