Critics reviews

Despite the out-of-control nature of this production, the result was a masterwork, and a film that perfectly utilized Brando’s own mixture of menace and charm. He really should have directed again; given how much he controlled other filmmakers’ sets, it’s pretty clear that he secretly wanted to.

The film's undeniable self-worship, so irritating to critics in 1961, feels tainted by uncertainty; Brando as a visual choice-maker seems much more comfortable turning Charles Lang's widescreen camera on the landscape, and there are evocative, muscular vistas of Death Valley and Monterey that make the long location waits pay off like gangbusters.

The film is defined by friction: between Brando's intensely interiorized lead performance as a bank robber seeking revenge and the moodiness of the pace; between the crisp widescreen cinematography and the extremely unconventional sound design.

It's a deeply introspective western, with most of the hallmarks of the genre, that's viscerally eaten up with the alienation of its director-actor, Marlon Brando. Contemporary audiences who know Brando less by his acting than by his tabloid reputation as a prodigious indulger, a man given to bountiful food and women, who was prone to endless re-takes on sets, might be astonished by the sense of authorial control that he exhibits here, both as filmmaker and star.

Along with The Night of the Hunter, One-Eyed Jacks might represent one of the best one-off directorial effort for an actor. Bizarre, obsessed and idiosyncratic, the film often feels like an extension of Brando's tortured reputation.

If One-Eyed Jacks proved anything about Brando, it was that _it's all true_—everything dubious, childish, and questionable about him, as enumerated by snark-tanking gatekeepers from Truman Capote on down to the lowliest tabloids. But so were the wild genius, the trick-shot bull's-eye instincts, the loose-cannon sensitivity and empathy bound up in a dozen shades of ambivalence.

If there is a tragedy, it is that Brando's frustration and disappointment with the experience of making the film, and its tepid reception, meant he never directed another. It is hard to judge someone's style from a single movie, and the direction of One-Eyed Jacks never calls attention to itself, but it seems to share aspects of Brando the performer: the genius for expressive detail, the heightened sensuality, the paradox of a stylized naturalism.

Those magnificent Pacific-coast locations, shot by Charles Lang, make Brando's film the rare western to prominently feature ocean views; the sound of the crash of waves and the squawk of seagulls is only one unexpected element in this highly idiosyncratic project.

Huppert is spellbinding as the icy, licentious victim; she seems to be daring the viewer to dislike her character, but the woman's mettle and barbed wit produce the opposite effect. Verhoeven masterfully stretches the suspense, and his gallows humor lands most of the time. His attempts at edginess slide into exploitation, though, as he entertains the notion that women might enjoy sexual assault and even deserve it.

Quite pungent, with enough signs of a controlling intelligence to make you wish that Brando had directed more than one film; if he errs on the side of making Rio as taciturnly badass as possible whenever directly confronted, in an almost proto-Clint way, he also declines to make excuses for the dude's craven backstabbing, which turns almost literal at the film's deliberately sorry excuse for a climactic showdown. At the same time, though, it frequently does deliver on a basic popcorn level.

Famous (and infamous) for being Marlon Brando's lone stab at directing, One-Eyed Jacks has remained underrated, underseen and misunderstood since its messy release... Though many critics find the film aimless and overly long, the picture, even with its messy backstory and clipped final product, remains an interesting, moody, richly realized Western that is, not surprisingly, beautifully acted by Brando and Malden.

There is a strong Freudian pull to the situation (the partner's name is "Dad") that is more ritualized than dramatized: the most memorable scenes have a fierce masochistic intensity, as if Brando were taking the opportunity to punish himself for some unknown crime. The bizarre action is set off by the classic Hollywood iconography of the western landscape (photographed by Charles Lang) and the supporting cast: Ben Johnson, Slim Pickens, and Elisha Cook Jr.