Marlon Brando’s 10 best films

Forty years after the seminal ‘Apocalypse Now’, Graeme Ross ranks the top 10 career-defining performances from one of modern cinema’s biggest influences

Brando's wardrobe in ‘Streetcar’ did wonders for T-shirt sales in the 1950s (Getty)

Forty years ago on 19 December 1979, Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Vietnam War masterpiece Apocalypse Now premiered in the UK. It was one of the most eagerly anticipated films of the decade – The Godfather director’s vision of the hell that was America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, based on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness.

Much of the buzz around Apocalypse Now was down to the involvement of the legendary Marlon Brando in a small yet pivotal role as renegade Green Beret Colonel Kurtz. In the seven years since working with Coppola, as Don Corleone in The Godfather in 1972, he had made just three films but the mere fact Brando was back in a significant film (and reunited with Coppola) was an event in itself. Brando, after all, was the great actor of his time who – after exploding onto the screen in the early 1950s – redefined the art of film acting by breaking all the rules of what had come before. He was the iconoclast who became an icon, the first rebel of post-war cinema and yet, ultimately, Brando’s rebellious nature – which had informed so many of his roles – and his disillusionment with the movie business, left him with a distaste for acting and Hollywood.

Much has been said on the assertion that he squandered talent in lieu of an easy pay-cheque, and it is true his legend rests with a surprisingly narrow list of films. However, as Martin Scorsese has said, “there is before Brando and after Brando” and accordingly, he left behind a handful of the greatest film performances ever seen and influenced generations of actors. Here is a look back at Brando’s 10 career-defining performances.