One-Eyed Jacks · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Dad Longworth ties his old partner to a hitching rail, whips him in front of the whole town, and then, with Rio still hanging there, brings a rifle butt down on his gun hand. The town watches. On paper this is a lawman punishing an escaped bank robber. What Dad is actually destroying is the one thing that could still convict him: the other man's ability to shoot.

Watch what that does to the movie. In a Western the gun hand is where the entire machine hinges, the place where seeing a wrong becomes correcting it. Brando breaks it at the midpoint and then keeps the camera running for another hour. What follows is a Western in which the hero cannot do the thing Westerns are for.

Deleuze had a name for that machine. He called classical Hollywood's dominant pattern the action-image in its large form, and the Western was his cleanest example: a vast situation closes around a man, compresses him until one move is left, he makes it, and the world afterward is different. The pressing is done by what Deleuze called the encompasser, usually the land itself, Ford's buttes standing over a rider like a verdict. The move is usually a duel, force against force, which he called the binomial. Rio and Dad are a perfect binomial. Two men, one robbery, one debt. Brando keeps every component and lets none of them turn over.

He hired the machinery on purpose. Charles Lang had shot The Man from Laramie, where a hero's gun hand is destroyed at point-blank range as a ritual of humiliation, and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, where two men sit inside one wide VistaVision frame for a whole scene while a friendship curdles with no cut to point at it. Brando took both, took The Searchers' conviction that the horizon passes moral judgment on whoever rides through it, and moved the apparatus to the Monterey surf. The substitution matters. Ford's desert opens; you can always ride further into it. The Pacific does not. This encompasser gives you the scale and indifference the buttes gave, plus something they never could: there is no further west. The situation that used to squeeze a man toward action now just closes the exit.

So what fills the running time? Waiting. Rio has one thing to do and two and a half hours in which not to do it. Scenes idle. Conversations run well past the point of delivering their information, into whiskey and cards and courtship and elaborate cordiality between two men who each know exactly what the other did. Deleuze's word for this is dead time: stretches where nothing advances and duration is simply held open, so you feel time instead of using it to measure plot. Most 1961 reviewers read it as self-indulgence, and the released cut, taken out of Brando's hands and trimmed by Paramount to 141 minutes, does not always defend itself. The method is still legible. Revenge deferred until it rots.

What Deleuze called the crisis of the action-image is usually dated to postwar Europe: people who see their situation clearly and can no longer respond to it adequately. Worth pausing on the fact that a Method actor out of the New York theatre, working in Technicolor for Paramount, walked it into the genre least equipped to absorb it, and did it through the body rather than through any idea about cinema. Rio's problem isn't philosophical. His hand doesn't work.

That is Brando's real invention here, and it isn't visual; he was candid about delegating the image to Lang. He directs behavior at the length behavior actually takes. Kazan taught him the procedure on On the Waterfront: shoot in long coverage until the actor stops performing, and let the beaten body of the hero become the moral event. Penn's The Left Handed Gun had already proved that Actors Studio business, the fidgeting and the hands busy with objects, could displace narrative event inside the Billy the Kid legend. Brando makes that the whole job. He blocks for the body and lets the camera accommodate. He holds setups wide and long so performers can hang in the frame. He loads every scene with hands, food, hats, cards, whiskey, and has actors speak while turned away or occupied, so meaning arrives sideways. Deleuze would call this a cinema of the body: the ordinary body, in its postures and small businesses, carrying the duration the plot has stopped carrying.

Once bodies carry the time, certain postures start to speak. Deleuze's term is the gest, an attitude that exposes a social relation the dialogue would rather keep decent. The flogging is this film's gest. It isn't a fight. It's a civic ritual performed before a watching community, in which the town's respectability publicly beats the thing it used to be, administered by a man who is both parties at once.

Which is why the title isn't decoration. A one-eyed jack is drawn in profile; you get one side of the face. Rio's taunt is that he has seen the other side. Deleuze, following Peirce, would call that a symbol, the object that condenses a film's organizing relation. All of Monterey is that card. The sheriff's office, the fiesta, the family table: Brando builds the entire architecture of respectability so it can be exposed as a set. Deleuze called this move naturalism, and kept it for filmmakers who treat the social world as a crust. The concrete setting we are handed, the derived milieu, turns out to be the skin over an originary world of appetite and predation with only one direction to go. The proposition is plain and nasty. Civic order isn't where the predator reformed. It's where he went to be safe.

There's a Bazinian instinct running through this that Brando seems to have reached without theory. Bazin wanted the shot held long enough and deep enough that the world stays whole and ambiguity survives the cutting; Brando wanted takes that ran until the actor stopped acting. Nearly the same request, made from the other side of the lens. The one place the film cuts hard is violence, where the shots shorten and the blow lands. It punctuates. It never drives.

The bill came due: six months of shooting against a two-month schedule, roughly $6 million against $1.8 million, an assembly reported near five hours, and finally the studio taking the picture and altering the ending. Brando never directed again. A lapsed copyright then dropped the film into the public domain, where for decades it survived as cropped, muddy dupes, which destroyed precisely what the argument rested on: VistaVision's fineness in weather and in skin. The 2016 restoration handed the case back its evidence.

The descendants are real. Peckinpah worked on this project and was fired from it, then returned to the same legend in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid with the betrayed partnership intact. The corrupt lawman, the sympathetic outlaw, the frank cruelty, the elegiac coastline: the revisionist Western of the next decade is audibly here first. The slow ritualized humiliation the Italians would industrialize from 1964 looks like the same sensibility, though convergence is the safer claim than influence.

One thing the film can't settle for you. The ending we have grants a survival the preceding two hours haven't earned, and the darker version Brando is said to have wanted doesn't survive to be checked. Watch it and decide what the right ending would be for a man whose capacity to act was smashed on a hitching rail in front of witnesses. Brando spent six months and his directing career insisting the answer was in the body. Watch the hands.