The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, October 5-11
One-Eyed Jacks (1961)
Directed by Marlon Brando
The New York Film Festival will screen a Universal Studios and Film Foundation 4K restoration of Brando’s only film as a director shortly before it receives a theatrical run at Film Forum. Brando also stars in the 1880s-set Western as Kid Rio, a bank robber and prison escapee striving to avenge himself against Dad Longworth (played by Karl Malden), the partner who betrayed him five years earlier. Dad has since assumed a new life as a domesticated sheriff in a Monterey seaside town, leading Kid to show up with murderous thoughts and plans to seduce his ex-pal’s soulful Mexican stepdaughter Louisa (Pina Pellicer)—with whom the outlaw, to his own surprise, finds himself falling in love. Charles Lang’s photography of Paramount’s last VistaVision film often features actors in opposite corners of the frame positioned at oblique angles to each other, a fitting visual pattern for a tale in which people’s motives are often unclear. Brando directs himself as though he were an block of stone with feelings peeking out between his face’s cracks; Malden as an ostensibly honest man who takes long strides in seeming efforts to hide his shadow; and the film’s numerous fine actresses as desperate improvisers scrambling to survive in a world run by beastly men. It’s rare to find a Hollywood film so nakedly Freudian in its atmosphere—one that uses big-budget means to represent a society filled with precariously civilized beings. Aaron Cutler (October 9, 12pm as part of the “Revivals” program at the New York Film Festival; October 14-20 at Film Forum, showtimes daily)