In this landscape, mature conventional Westerns like My Darling Clementine (1946), Shane (1953), and Rio Bravo (1959) stood shoulder to shoulder with a new type of movie. Westerns such as Broken Arrow (1950), High Noon (1952), and Johnny Guitar (1954) tweaked, twisted, and updated the genre — Broken Arrow with a sympathetic portrayal of Native Americans; Johnny Guitar with an arch Joan Crawford at the center of a sexually ambiguous melodrama; High Noon as a parable of the anti-communist witch hunts which were plaguing America (and Hollywood) at that time.

Two landmark Supreme Court decisions opened the way for these unorthodox films to be made. In 1948, the Court ordered the Hollywood studios who owned theater chains —MGM, Paramount, 20^th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, and RKO — to divest themselves of those theaters. The idea was that a studio’s control over production, distribution, and exhibition represented restraint of trade. In 1952, citing the First Amendment’s freedom of speech clause, the Court eliminated government censorship from movies. Until that ruling, there had been hundreds of state and local “decency” ordinances that the film industry felt compelled to follow. Now, less fettered by censorship (Hollywood still had to deal with pressure from conservative religious groups), filmmakers were freer to produce unconventional fare. Untethered from studio demands, exhibitors were free to book a wider range of movies.

The movie studios were also facing stiff competition from the new medium of television. I Love Lucy, Gunsmoke, and Leave It To Beaver were pulling eyeballs (and revenue) away from the cinema. Movies sought to differentiate themselves from their small screen cousins. One way was to GO BIG. Wide-screen, Technicolor, 3-D, stereo. Another was to go off-beat. Influenced by the edgy, innovative films coming out of Europe, a slice of American movies began to shade darker, bleaker. They began to challenge mainstream values.

And into this mix of cultural and economic change stepped the brightest star in the Hollywood galaxy.

Marlon Brando’s 1947 tour de force performance as Stanley Kowalski in the Broadway production of Streetcar Named Desire revolutionized the art of acting. His performance in the film version of Streetcar made him an international movie star and sex symbol. In The Wild One, Brando transformed himself into an alienated, leather-jacketed biker — and became the poster boy of rebellious youth. In 1954, he won his first Oscar for his portrayal of a deeply conflicted, tough-but-vulnerable, dockworker who rats out a corrupt union boss in On the Waterfront.

By age 31, Marlon Brando was the most popular movie star in the world. He was a bigger box office draw than Cary Grant, John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart, all of whom were beginning the downside of their careers. His contemporaries, James Dean and Montgomery Clift, were either dead (Dean, at age 24 in a car crash) or in steep decline (Clift in a drug and alcohol haze).

But Brando wanted to do more than act.

It was exactly at this time that the Hollywood studios were losing their grip on the film industry. Without their own theaters, the studios were no longer motivated to churn out copious amounts of product each week to fill seats. Add to that, movies were losing audience share to television. So the studios began cutting back on the number of films they released each year. With less product in the pipeline, they were choosing not to renew hefty, long-term contracts with their top players. Movie stars including Burt Lancaster, Cary Grant, and Kirk Douglass used this opening to form their own production companies.

Brando named his company Pennebaker Inc. in honor of his late mother (Pennebaker was her maiden name). He said that the purpose of his new venture was, “to make pictures that were not only entertaining but had social value and gave me a sense that I was helping to improve the condition of the world.”

The big studios still provided the sound stages, technicians, know-how, and big bucks for smaller companies. Pennebaker partnered with Paramount, setting up shop on their Melrose Avenue lot. Pennebaker’s first film was Sayonara, the story of an American ace fighter pilot (Brando) who falls in love with a Japanese actress. The movie dealt with issues of racism and bigotry. It was a critical success.

Brando was particularly interested in making a Western. For several years, he looked for properties to adapt, and worked on developing a script set in the Old West. At one point, he even attempted to adapt The Count of Monte Cristo to the Old West. But nothing seemed to jell. Then he caught wind of a novel, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, based loosely on the Pat Garrett/Billy the Kid legend. The book had already been optioned by producer Frank Rosenberg, and a screen adaptation written by Rod “Twilight Zone” Serling. Serling’s script was being revised by a bit actor with aspirations to write and direct — Sam Peckinpah. Brando brought the book, screenplay, producer, and writer over to Pennebaker. He worked with Peckinpah on the script for a while. Eventually, he replaced Peckinpah with novelist/screenwriter Calder Willingham, who in turn was replaced by veteran screenwriter Guy Trosper.

To direct, Brando hired maverick filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, fresh off his anti-war film Paths of Glory. However, after working together for six months, Brando and Kubrick couldn’t agree on a final script. So they agreed to part ways. Brando decided to direct the movie himself.

For the cast of One-Eyed Jacks, Brando assembled a group of supremely talented character actors, including Katy Jurado, Ben Johnson, and Slim Pickens. He chose his close friend and fellow Method actor, Karl Malden, to co-star. Shooting began in 1958, in Monterey, California. Along with his acting and directing duties, Brando worked daily with screenwriter Trosper, revising the script. “I was making it up as I went along…I didn’t know what I was doing,” the first-time director readily admitted.

Interested in bringing emotional and psychological depth to his Western, as well as a feeling of spontaneity, Brando encouraged his cast to improvise their lines. Numerous takes were shot, each a bit different, until the director got what he was looking for. Conscious of his directorial inexperience, Brando also made sure to cover each scene from numerous angles, shooting more than most directors would, to be sure he had what he needed for editing.

Understandably, Brando cared deeply about this movie; he wanted everything to be just right. On location in Monterey, with a large cast and crew on payroll, he waited for just the right light, just the right wave, before shooting a scene. All this took time. Shooting ran over-schedule. The budget began to balloon. Paramount executives, who were funding the film, began to get nervous.

Next, filming moved onto the Paramount lot, where elaborate sets such as the “fiesta scene” had been built. In the controlled environment of a Hollywood studio, things were expected to go more smoothly. But no such luck. In a freak Los Angeles storm, the One-Eyed Jack sets were destroyed.

Final filming took place in Death Valley, California, where temperatures hit 117°. In addition to this extreme heat, the production team had to deal with their lead actor’s obvious weight gain. Brando had steadily put on pounds during the course of production. His costumes needed to be adjusted and re-sewn — again and again. Camera angles were arranged to mask his expanding girth.

By the time shooting was complete, One-Eyed Jacks’s three month shooting schedule had stretched to six.

After months of painstaking editing, Brando finally screened his cut for Paramount. The movie was eight hours long. Paramount insisted that he drastically shorten the film. They also demanded re-shoots, including a new “happier” ending. Brando and his editor began re-cutting. The production team was re-assembled and the requisite new scenes were shot. When Brando showed the studio his condensed cut, it was five and a half hours long. At this point, Paramount took over the editing process. Brando walked away from his movie in frustration and disgust. He would never approve the final cut.

By the time it was complete, One-Eyed Jacks’s $1.8 million dollar budget had swollen to $6 million. Today, many would agree that the 141 minutes that made it to the screen was worth every penny.

Shot in sumptuous, wide-screen VistaVision, with elaborate set pieces and studio-created costumes, One-Eyed Jacks has the look and feel of an old fashioned Hollywood Western. Plot-wise, it is a classic revenge story. The movie begins with Rio (Brando) and his partner, “Dad” Longworth, robbing a bank in Mexico. Longworth betrays Rio and takes off with the loot, leaving Rio to rot in a Mexican prison for five years. After he escapes, Rio tracks down Longworth who is now a prosperous sheriff in a small California town, He finds Longworth ensconced in a comfortable home with a Mexican-American wife and a grown step-daughter, Luisa. Thirsting for revenge, Rio plots with new outlaw partners to rob the town bank right under Longworth’s nose. For further revenge, he seduces the sweet and innocent Luisa.

Longworth seethes when he discovers that his former friend has seduced his step-daughter. He captures Rio and personally administers a vicious public whipping. Then he crushes Rio’s gun hand. Rio and his gang retreat to a nearby fishing village where Rio recuperates and plans his next move. Without Rio’s approval, the gang robs the bank. The robbery turns into a shoot-out and a girl is accidentally killed. Using the killing as a pretext (even though Rio was not even present for the incident), Longworth puts Rio in jail to await his execution by hanging. Luisa, who has fallen in love with Rio, tries to help him escape, but fails. Eventually, Rio escapes on his own. He kills Longworth in a shoot-out and rides off with Luisa.

However, within this typical Western plot, lies a subversive story. From the opening scene where bank robber Rio eats a banana, then casually tosses the peel onto a gold scale, the film is in rebellion against the conventions of the genre. For starters, while early scenes take place in the arid Mexican desert, much of the later action is set against the crashing surf of the verdant Monterey coast, assuring that the movie never quite feels like a “normal” Western.

Released in 1961, here’s what major critics had to say about the movie at that time.

“It proceeds in two contrasting styles,” wrote New York Times critic Bosley Crowther. “One is hard and realistic; the other is romantic and lush. All he way through it runs a jangle of artistic ambivalence.”

“The bizarre action is set off by the classic Hollywood iconography of the western landscape,” opined Dave Kehr in the Chicago Reader.

Perhaps, though, it’s less the actual action which is bizarre, but rather the meaning woven into the action, the psychological and emotional reverberations that ricochet around each scene, seemingly incongruous amongst the Old West tropes of gunslingers, outlaws, sagebrush, and horses. Add to that a layer of political subversion that simmers just below the surface, and it’s no wonder that critics and audiences didn’t quite know what to make of this strange cinematic stew.

The Original Sin of America is the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of the Native population. Slavery and slaughter were the bedrock of the new nation’s wealth. One-Eyed Jacks works as a subtle indictment of white supremacy, patriarchy, and imperial conquest, striking at the core of the American project. Whether this was a deliberate ideological choice, or whether more the expression of an incipient sensibility — or some of both — we’ll never know.

What we do know is what we see. And what we see is a revenge plot which serves as the scaffolding for a complex questioning of values. The Original Sin of One-Eyed Jacks is Dad Longworth’s betrayal of Rio in the mountains of Mexico. Longworth uses the gold he pockets during this betrayal to begin his climb to prosperity and power in California. As sheriff of Monterey, he rules as a benevolent, blue-eyed, patriarch. At the annual town fiesta, he speaks from a high platform to his people — a happily diverse crowd of whites and Mexican-Americans. Beside Longworth floats an oversized balloon painted with the words Fair Play For All. At home with his Mexican wife and step-daughter, Longworth plays the role of devoted, loving, husband and father.

Then Rio shows up and threatens to crack open the whole façade.

While the town folks of Monterey are aware of Longworth’s outlaw past, they don’t know about his morally corrupt soul. “You may be a one-eyed jack around here, but I’ve seen the other side of your face,” Rio says to his antagonist.

But in truth, there are two one-eyed jacks in town. Rio, like Longworth, uses deception to get what he wants. In particular, he exploits and deceives women. At the beginning of the film, he steals a ring from a woman during the bank robbery, then gives it to the Mexican senorita he is seducing. “My mother gave this to me right before she died,” he lies. Later, he uses this same ploy with Luisa, presenting her with a necklace he just bought off a street vendor and passing it off as his mother’s. “It would be an honor if you’d wear this,” he oozes with fake sincerity.

Longworth and Rio’s deceits create parallel emotional blowback. Neither man is at peace with his own behavior. Both turn their unacknowledged shame outward. Longworth needs to punish and kill Rio not simply to maintain his standing in the community, but to silence his guilt for betraying Rio in Mexico. His self-image as a “good guy” demands that he kill all knowledge of his wrongdoing. “You will do anything,” his wife confronts him towards the end of the movie, “to hide the memory of what you did to him,”

Likewise, “good guys” don’t hurt women. So, like Longworth, Rio turns his guilt outward as well. In denial that his lying and manipulation of women is hurtful and abusive, Rio seems to draw the line at physical abuse. When he witnesses a man mistreating a women in a bar, he seethes and eventually comes to her rescue. His intervention sets off a shootout during which he kills the abuser.

One of the salient tropes of the Western is the rationalization of violence. The hero is morally licensed to kill as long as his enemy is presented as hideous enough to warrant annihilation. (Scalp-taking Indians, for example. Or bomb-wielding Arab terrorists.) As a Western hero, Rio is excused for his aggression towards unsavory characters such as the woman-abusing bar patron or the lecherous deputy sheriff. These antagonists are portrayed as worse than Rio —perfect foils for the genre, perfect targets for Rio’s projected shame.

But unlike the conventional Western hero, Rio eventually looks inward. In the course of his relationship with Luisa, he grows emotionally. He gains self-knowledge. He realizes that his lies have consequences, that his actions have hurt Luisa. He admits to her that “everything I told you last night was lies.” Admitting to his deceit, he is free to change. After much brooding and hesitation, he decides to give up his revenge quest to seek a life of possible happiness with Luisa. Which is where Rio and Longworth’s psychological trajectories diverge. Longworth never budges from his need to kill his projected inner demons.

In another turn away from tradition, the main women characters in One-Eyed Jacks do not conform to the stereotypical Madonna/prostitute split. Both Luisa and her mother, Maria, are women of “hearth and home.” They are also sexual outlaws. Both have sex and become pregnant out of wedlock. And neither is ashamed of this fact. Maria lies to her husband in order to protect her daughter’s affair with Rio. When the game is up, she finally tells her husband the truth. His response — “Is this the thanks I get for taking you out of the bean fields?” — reveals the racist underpinnings of his domestic tyranny.

And speaking of racism, as the movie progresses and lines are drawn, those who align themselves with Rio — Luisa, Maria, and his loyal friend Modesto — are all people of color. The “bad guys” are all white males, each of whom is revealed as a bigot of one sort or another. When Rio and his gang retreat to a small Chinese fishing village so he can rehab his crushed hand, gang member Bob Emory is cruel and dismissive towards the Chinese villagers. Later, while betraying Rio, Bob sneers that Modesto is a “greaser” — just before gunning him down.

One-Eyed Jacks was not the only anti-racist Western of its time. Films such as Devil’s Doorway (1950), The Searchers (1956), and Two Rode Together (1961) dealt with issues of racism. Likewise, Brando’s film was hardly the only psychological Western of its era; the 1950s were a time when psychoanalysis was big in Hollywood culture. Often noted for its Oedipal intimations (“Dad” Longworth, anyone?), One-Eyed Jacks joins a crowd of other “Oedipal Westerns” such as Red River (1947), The Man From Laramie (1955), The Last Sunset (1961).

However, with its vague coalition of outsiders, its psychological depth, and its impulse to re-write history, One-Eyed Jacks, astutely presaged the future of race, gender and counterculture politics.

When the film was released in 1961, critiques of patriarchal power and racist hegemony were not exactly on the lips of the general public. To the contrary, that was the year President Kennedy inaugurated his New Frontier. Harnessing Old West symbolism in the pursuit of global domination, the western frontier moved from Kansas to Indochina. In the slang of war, C-rations were dubbed John Wayne cookies, danger zones were referred to as Indian Country, and secret military ops were codenamed Sam Houston and Daniel Boone.

As the 1960s became The Sixties, a counter narrative emerged. Young people protesting the war in Vietnam allied with African Americans, Chicanos, Native Americans, women, and gays fighting for civil rights. Counterculture youth grew long hair, wore beads and headbands, lived in communal (tribal) houses. One underground newspaper was named the Berkeley Tribe.

One-Eyed Jacks not only foreshadowed the new social consciousness of the 1960s, it also prefigured the counterculture-ish revisionist Westerns that followed. Movies such as Little Big Man (1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), and Blazing Saddles (1974) blatantly flipped conventions of the genre as they skewered American expansionism, capitalism, and white supremacy.

Perhaps, given the social messages layered into One-Eyed Jacks, it’s no surprise that Marlon Brando became a political activist in the 1960s. He was an early supporter of the civil rights movement, participating in the 1963 March on Washington alongside Dr. Martin Luther King. In 1964, he was arrested while protesting a broken treaty that had promised fishing rights to Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest. Later in the 1960s, Brando became a supporter of the Black Panthers. Most famously, in 1973, he declined the Academy Award for Best Actor in The Godfather. In his place, he sent to the stage Native American actress Sacheen Littlefeather who read a speech about the poor treatment of Native Americans in the film industry. Brando remained a supporter of activist causes for the rest of his life.

The ending of One Eye Jacks is emblematic of its spot in film history — one foot in old Hollywood, one foot in a new kind of cinema. At the conclusion of the movie, Rio shoots Longworth in a final gun fight. As scripted and originally filmed, Rio and Luisa begin their escape on horseback, but a dying Longworth gets off one final shot, accidentally killing Luisa. Paramount, however, demanded a change. The ending was considered too downbeat and depressing. New scenes were shot, and the ending was re-edited. In the final version, Longworth’s bullet hits nothing but dust. Luisa lives. She rides out of town with Rio, and they say a sappy goodbye at the beach, Rio promising to return in time for the birth of their baby.

If that ending sounds tacked-on and schmaltzy on paper, it plays even worse on screen. The viewer is left with a saccharine sentiment incongruous with the bulk of the film. On the other hand, for a movie whose outstanding feature may be its artistic ambivalence, the ending is just about right.

(Eve Goldberg is a writer and filmmaker.  Her articles have appeared in Hippocampus, The Gay & Lesbian Review, The Reading Room and AmericanPopularCulture.com.  Her film and television credits include Emmy-nominated Legacy of the Hollywood Blacklist, and Cover Up: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair.  Her first book, Hollywood Hang Ten, is a mystery novel set in 1963 Los Angeles. See a sampling of her short films on her web site at https://eve-goldberg.com/

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