One-Eyed Jacks

Sonora, Mexico, 1880: After a bank robbery, the two outlaws Rio (Marlon Brando) and Dad Longworth (Karl Malden) are cornered by the police. Longworth is ordered to fetch another horse for their escape and dares to make a break for it - but he does not return, leaving Rio to his fate. He is caught and spends the next five years in the hell of a Mexican prison. When he finally manages to escape, he has only one thing on his mind: to take revenge on his former buddy who abandoned him and made off with the loot.

He tracks Dad down in Monterey, California, where he now leads a respectable life as the town sheriff. He is married to local girl Maria (Katy Jurado) and prides himself on being a good stepfather to their daughter Louisa (Pina Pellicer). Rio's revenge plan is to destroy this bourgeois idyll of his former friend: first by seducing Louisa and then by killing Dad. But he falls in love with the young woman, and suddenly things are no longer so clear and simple. Dad, on the other hand, wants to eliminate Rio because he is the only one who knows about Dad's dark past. A psychologically thrilling and violent drama takes its course...

ONE-EYED JACKS is Marlon Brando's first and only directorial work. Originally, the then young and up-and-coming Stanley Kubrick was supposed to direct the film - but after heated disagreements with Brando, who had bought the rights to the material and had clear ideas for the film, Kubrick withdrew from the job two weeks before shooting was due to start - and Brando took over himself. The fact that he did not have much directing experience was evident from the chaos during production, which lasted a full six months instead of ten weeks and exceeded the planned budget many times over. The sometimes indecisive, sometimes fussy director shot vast amounts of material. The first rough cut lasted eight hours, which he reduced to five hours for the film studio; the studio insisted on reshoots to tighten up the story and ultimately cut the film down to just under two and a half hours without Brando.

This did not detract from the film's status as an extremely innovative, independent western. Brando was not content with merely imitating other films in the genre. Instead, he used the film's revenge plot to deconstruct the basic structures of the genre and transform ONE-EYED JACKS into a fascinating link between the squeaky-clean Westerns of classic Hollywood and the revisionist Westerns of New Hollywood. In this respect, and also in its ambivalence and violence, the film anticipates some aspects of the later Italian westerns. Also atypical for a western, ONE-EYED JACKS was filmed in Big Sur, California, with many scenes set directly on the Pacific Ocean - another great idea by Marlon Brando. All in all, ONE-EYED JACKS is now regarded as an exceptional western noir with outstanding acting performances full of intensity - and was presented in a restored version in the Classics section at Cannes in 2016 and selected two years later by the Library of Congress for archiving in the United States National Film Registry.