In the early months of 1958, Marlon Brando at last found a new film property that interested him. Sayonara had become a major success, confirming his worst suspicions about public taste. He had been virtually inactive since completion of production on The Young Lions. Now the genial producer Frank P. Rosenberg had come up with a novel entitled The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, by Charles Neider, that he liked because it was, in his own words, “the furthest west Western I had ever read.”
During the work on the film, Brando’s marriage to Anna Kashfi was faltering, and he began seeing actress France Nuyen. Brando insisted on casting Nuyen as the Chinese girl in the story, but director Stanley Kubrick refused. Brando chose to exercise his star’s prerogative and told Frank Rosenberg that Kubrick had to go. Now, without a director — but with commitments from a cast of actors — the film was in trouble. In a bold move to salvage the project, Brando announced that he would direct.
Brando the director still worked as slowly as ever, and the film fell behind schedule. One-Eyed Jacks, as the film was renamed, was drastically overbudget. It eventually was released in 1961 to very mixed reviews and little box-office success.
Toward the end of shooting One-Eyed Jacks, Anna filed a petition for divorce, charging that Brando had caused her “mental suffering, distress and injury.” On March 25, Brando filed an appearance, stipulation and waiver stating that the divorce was uncontested. The interlocutory decree was granted on April 22, 1959. She was granted custody of their son, Christian Devi.
Mario Puzo was a little-known author whose career had been limping along with modest sales and indifferent reviews. Then came his novel about an organized-crime family, The Godfather. The book rose with amazing rapidity to become the No. 1 best-seller in the country, with 67 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. It also became the fastest-selling novel in paperback up to that time. Even the reviews were good.
Puzo had sold the film rights early on to Paramount for a mere $12,500 option payment against $50,000 with escalators. He was appalled when he read an article stating that Danny Thomas was being considered for the role of the imposing patriarch, godfather Don Corleone. Nothing could have been further from Puzo’s vision of the character; he was determined from the outset to have Brando play the role.
So the novelist called Brando out of the blue to urge him to consider the part. Brando, however, did not respond with even the slightest interest. Not having read the novel, his impression was that The Godfather was just another gangster thriller.
Francis Ford Coppola was assigned to direct. He had come off a series of failures, including The Rain People and Finian’s Rainbow, but studio head Bob Evans was convinced that, as an Italian himself, Coppola would be ideal for the project. The hunt continued for an actor to play Corleone.
Several, headed by Ernest Borgnine, were mentioned, and the attorney Melvin Belli was said to be anxious to act the part. However, Coppola, after many meetings and interviews with unknowns, felt finally that only two actors were great enough: Laurence Olivier and Brando. Tentative inquiries showed that Olivier was suffering from a severe illness and would be neither insurable nor available to play the role.
When Coppola and producer Al Ruddy brought Brando’s name before Paramount’s board, they were unequivocally told that he was out of the question. Not only was it widely known that Brando had suffered a decade of failures and that the audience had evidently lost interest in him, but he was also notoriously difficult on the set. And, despite the huge success of the novel, the film was given a tight production budget and a short schedule for shooting.
Preproduction discussions began and continued in an atmosphere of tension and anxiety. Coppola decided to rewrite Puzo’s first-draft screenplay, and during this arduous work Puzo reiterated his desire to have Brando play Corleone. Soon, everybody wanted to be in the picture. Rod Steiger, already middle-aged and fat, wanted to play Michael, who was slim and 25 years old. Finally, Al Pacino was cast in that role, and James Caan secured the part of Sonny Corleone. As for Brando, Ruddy and Coppola finally wore away the objections of the Paramount brass. It was agreed they would ask Brando to do the unthinkable — a screen test. It was the first he had made since 1946, when he had gone into Twentieth Century-Fox New York at the behest of Meyer Mishkin.
By now, Brando had read the book and loved it. Not only was he impressed by the power and forcefulness of Puzo’s writing, but he understood instantly the point the novelist was making: Since America was run by the corporate mentality, it was inevitable that crime would be institutionalized in the United States. With his usual sharp instincts, he smelled a big commercial success, which he badly needed.
He was paid $500,000 with a percentage of deferments. This turned out to be a tremendous deal for him. He began preparing for the part with a concentration that belied once more his public contempt for his art and recalled his earlier days of dedication and youthful ambition.
Ruddy recalled that Brando went to New York and met with mobsters in clubs in Greenwich Village, observing them at close quarters. He picked up their mannerisms with his customary skill; he learned much from them of a gangster’s way of life.
Shooting took place in Manhattan and on Staten Island, with some studio interiors. Brando loved working with Coppola. Ruddy said, “From the beginning, Brando was committed to his part completely. He refused to go to the locations in a limousine, and instead was picked up at his hotel in a station wagon. Though he needed to be visually cued in on the beginnings of his speeches, he remembered them with an accuracy and conscientiousness he hadn’t shown in 15 years.”
The actors, led by Pacino and Caan, were deeply in awe of him. “In a sense, Brando had ‘created’ these guys,” Ruddy explained. “Without him, they would never have existed. They just stood there frozen when they first met him. Brando strolled onto the set as they stood lined up to meet him. In an instant, he cracked a joke or two, relaxed, fooled around, made fun of them, let them make fun of him, and in 10 minutes they were all one big gang together.”
In his big sequences — in which Don Corleone refused to participate in drug deals, barely escapes a murder attempt, tries to arrange a truce between the rival gangs and dies on camera in his garden — Brando made an unforgettable impression. The stuffing in his mouth and the dental device that further distorted it gave him a look of cruelty, while his haunted dark eyes, circled with black makeup, stared out as though from a private inferno.
The greatest scene was in the garden. There were problems in shooting it. The location manager had found the perfect spot: a compound in Staten Island, for which the art director designed a highly photogenic wall. Tomato plants were planted to create a vivid and colorful background. But rain washed them away, and Ruddy took his courage into his hands and asked Brando if he would work a few extra days without charging heavy overages so that the plants could be replaced. He only hesitated a second before he agreed, and when his lawyer Norman Garey objected, he overruled him.
Ruddy was lost in gratitude and admiration.
Another problem with the scene was that it couldn’t be rehearsed or done in many takes because of the presence of the 5-year-old boy playing the Don’s grandson, who shares with him his final moments. Therefore, Brando had to do it perfectly in one long sustained series of dying gestures.
Right in the middle of the sequence, without warning Coppola or Ruddy, he pulled an irregular piece of orange peel out of his pocket and pushed it into his mouth, startling the child as much as he startled his producer and director. It was a trick he had often used to surprise Christian when he was very young. Coppola kept the camera rolling. He let the scene play in full, knowing that Brando had made the right decision.
Initially, as the film was being made, it had been attacked by Italian pressure groups as defamatory of the whole community. Letters poured in threatening demonstrations, boycotts or strikes. Yet, once the movie was finished, it instantly found acceptance at nearly every level of press and society. The critics were virtually unanimous in declaring it a major work. Although it ran three hours, and the studio talked of trimming it, Ruddy and Coppola fought for its full length and won.
Newsweek’s Paul D. Zimmerman summed it all up when he wrote, “There is no longer any need to talk tragically of Brando’s career. His stormy two-decade odyssey through films good and bad, but rarely big enough to house his prodigious talents, has ended in triumph.” Calling The Godfather the Gone With the Wind of gangster movies, Zimmerman went on, “(Once) he was hailed as the greatest actor of his generation. Now, at 47, the king has returned to claim his throne.”
The Godfather went on to become the top-grossing film of its day.
