Meet Marlon Brando

Marlon Brando is meeting the press in New York to promote his latest film, Morituri. It's supposed to be a press junket but the discussion becomes wide-ranging and often tackles the Civil Rights debate. He is flirtatious, insightful, combative, and playful. One gets a sense of the man. He's mostly free with his comments. Today, people have media training. They have fun with it but rarely go near any dangerous waters. Marlon dips his toes into those dangerous waters more often than not. In between the tougher discussions, he's playing with the press, flirts with the pretty female reporters, and shows off his many language skills. It's no more than half an hour.

Meet Marlon Brando (1966)

**** (out of 4)

Terrific documentary covering Marlon Brando's 1965 press junket for the film Morituri, which has the actor sitting in a hotel lobby and answering questions from various reporters. In my opinion Brando was the greatest actor to ever grace the movie screen and he was also one of the most fascinating people to listen to. He has several interviewers asking him questions ranging from various subjects including his films, Civil Rights, the American Indian and other social issues and it's great to see how he tackles these various subjects. Needless to say, he's really not interested in talking about his movies or what a great actor he is. He certainly doesn't do his film any justice as he either doesn't want to talk about it or throws mild insults at it. The real charm is seeing how Brando talks to the reporter depending on whether they're female or male. With the male reporters he doesn't really take them too serious and blows off the majority of their questions. With the females, he turns on that classic charm and spends most of the interview flirting with them. This makes for some great laughs and it's easy to see why the women would fall to their feet for him. The film runs 25-minutes and there's not a boring moment anywhere in it and it's a shame there couldn't have been more to see.

This 1966 documentary short was shown on TCM on June 8, 2022 as part of their Wednesday night looks that month at method actors. Brando is charming, funny and occasionally serious to the men and women alike. His attempts to flirt with several of the women are deflected to get him to focus on telling them something about himself and his movies. The documentary lacks credits, and the pageant titleholder at the end is Miss USA 1964, Bobbi Johnson, not Miss America 1964, Donna Axum.

That's what Marlon Brando has got in abundance, and i must say that although it's only 25 minutes long, his performance here is better than a lot of his less than enthusiastic movie roles. He manages to constantly entertain while at the same time not compromising himself with cheap 'hukster' talk. He comes back often to the theme of thinking for yourself (as John Lennon, another of my idols, often did too)and not believing propaganda, and ingredient x comes out in the looks he gives which say a thousand words. When one of the interviewers says his new picture 'must be good' (or similar) his look said 'you didn't mean that', 'making movies is boring' etc....

I was impressed that most of the interviewers, after starting in her t.v voices and with a conventional approach, played along with Marlon and were funny themselves.

quite a rare film. i saw it by accident in the t.v listings today on BBC4 and watched it with joy. see it if you can!!