Italy’s Torino Film Festival will celebrate the centennial of Marlon Brando‘s birth with a 24-title retrospective of films featuring the groundbreaking two-time Oscar winner, known for his naturalistic acting style and rebellious streak.
The Brando retro will be “the backbone” of the fest, according to its new artistic director, Italian actor/director Giulio Base. Accordingly, an image of Brando – photographed when he was shooting Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris” – is featured on the poster for the fest’s upcoming 42nd edition, which will run Nov. 22-30.
Torino is Italy’s preeminent event for young directors and indie cinema, and is where Matteo Garrone and Paolo Sorrentino screened their first works. The festival’s lineup will be announced at a later date.
Courtesy Torino Film Festival
“As an actor, Brando has always been my guiding star and I had been wondering for a while – since way before being appointed at Torino – how I would be able to celebrate his work,” Base, who was named Torino chief last July, told Variety.
The Torino Film Festival is run by Italy’s National Film Museum in Turin, a cinematic shrine housed in the iconic Mole Antonelliana domed tower, which is the Northern city’s main landmark. The museum staff has assembled the 24 titles selected by Base and his collaborators amid Brando’s vast filmography.
This includes Fred Zinneman’s 1950 drama “The Men,” the movie in which Brando made his big-screen debut playing a paraplegic war veteran, after having made a splash on on Broadway playing the Stanley Kowalski character in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire.” A 1950 Variety review somewhat tersely concluded: “Brando, a newcomer from Broadway stage, where he starred in ‘Streetcar Named Desire,’ plays his role realistically, often without sympathy but certainly with a feeling for the part. He is a new type of leading man, and as such must be accepted.”
Other titles selected by Torino to celebrate Brando, who was born in Omaha, Neb., on April 3, 1924, include Elia Kazan’s 1951 film adaptation of “A Streetcar Named Desire”; Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s “Julius Caesar” (1953); Kazan’s “On the Waterfront,” for which Brando won his first Oscar in 1954; Sydney Lumet’s “The Fugitive Kind” (1959); and Brando’s directorial debut “One-Eyed Jacks” (1961), in which he also starred.
Subsequent movies starring Brando set for the Torino retro comprise his unforgettable roles in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” (1972) and “Apocalypse Now” (1979); Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris” (1972); Richard Donner’s “Superman” (1978); Euzhan Palcy’s “A Dry White Season” (1989); Jeremy Leven’s “Don Juan De Marco” (1994); and John Frankenheimer and Richard Stanley’s “The Island of Dr. Moreau” (1996).
