Review of One-Eyed Jacks (1961)
Seen in 2025.
The only film that Marlon Brando directed was released twelve years before he sent activist Sacheen Littlefeather to reject an Oscar on his behalf. The sober attitude that he and she would have in 1973 is already visible here, in 1961. One-Eyed Jacks has many of the flaws of contemporary Western films, including “cowboys” without any relationship to cows, and eight bullets in one six-shooter, but the film’s psychology is a generation ahead of its time. Everyone, regardless of their sex and ethnicity, is a complex, realistic human being. The environments are gorgeous in their harshness, including a ramshackle set on the West Coast that deserves every minute it gets on the screen.
The symbolic underpinnings of the script are not in Cortés’s Mexico. Brando follows an altogether different Leyendra Negra through pat Freudian territory, where his character and love interest are the younger generation breaking free from figurative and literal parents by conflicted methods. The rebellious love that redeems the hot-tempered bad boy is a cliché, but this is the finest smouldering that the late Golden Age of Hollywood had to offer.