Word: brando
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Once Marlon Brando's disguise has been penetrated and the great eccentric has been identified, such suspense as The Formula manages to generate comes to an abrupt and early end, though whatever fun and frolic the film offers depends solely on his occasional presence as the comically menacing leader of an oil cartel. Perhaps one should say the oil cartel. The movie traffics heavily in this kind of simple-minded paranoia. It insists that evil lurks in a single all-powerful force possessing the power to warp men's minds, condition their behavior and, of course, bump them...
...record, Brando is the character wearing granny glasses and a hearing aid, the one whose fringe of white hair curls cunningly around a large bald spot and whose corpulence is encased in a wardrobe that seems to have been picked up at a thrift sale managed by the estate of Charles Foster Kane. Brando has also got himself up with a down-home country-boy accent that makes his cynicism terribly appealing-especially in the bloody and lugubrious context of this emotionally unpunctuated movie. His performance is not truly good-it lacks a real edge of sharpness...
That is the beginning of The Formula, an MGM film that opens nationally this week and stars George C. Scott and Marlon Brando. The movie panders to the many who believe that the energy crisis is all just a plot by Big Oil. In this case the energy companies have a formula for cheap fuel, but they are keeping it a secret in order to maintain high prices and gouge the public...
...companies are naturally unhappy about once again being cast in the role of the heavy. Mobil Oil lawyers have met privately with MGM officials to object. Says a Mobil spokesman: "This is not even a good piece of fiction." The clear winner from the film is Marlon Brando, who received a reported $250,000 a day for ten days' work. That is a real formula for making money...
...first Oscar for a 1927 war comedy called Two Arabian Knights. He also directed the 1931 version of The Front Page, starring Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien, the 1940 Of Mice and Men, starring Burgess Meredith, and the 1962 remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando...