Film of the day: One-Eyed Jacks (1961), Marlon Brando’s sole directing credit. On its own, it’s a solid revenge Western: the bandit Rio spends five years in a Mexican prison after his partner abandons him along with the loot, gets out, and goes looking for his former friend, who has by then become sheriff of a coastal town.
More interesting than the plot is the arithmetic. Brando delivered a 4-hour-42-minute cut to the studio; the version released theatrically ran 141 minutes. Exactly half. Not “they trimmed the fat,” not “they cut the ending” — they took out exactly as much film as they left in, and what they took out was later destroyed.
There’s a second thread, too, one I didn’t expect to find here: this was the last American film shot entirely in VistaVision. The format returned to active use sixty-three years later, and more on that below.
It began with Charles Neider’s novel The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones (1956), a retelling of the Billy the Kid story, moved from New Mexico to California’s Monterey Peninsula. The first adaptation was commissioned by producer Frank Rosenberg and written by Rod Serling, the future creator of The Twilight Zone; the script was rejected. Then young Sam Peckinpah took it on and completed his first draft on November 11, 1957.
Pennebaker, the production company Brando founded with his father, bought the rights — and here comes the first discrepancy I never fully untangled. The American Film Institute catalog gives $150,000 for the option on the novel and Peckinpah’s script. Wikipedia says Pennebaker paid $40,000 specifically for the book. A fourfold difference, and both versions rest on late-fifties press coverage. I left the range in the text, because forcing it into one neat number would be worse than admitting the gap.
Next came the directors. Stanley Kubrick was signed first; he left on November 20, 1958, two weeks before shooting began. The official reason was scheduling and work on Lolita; New York newspapers at the time wrote of creative differences. Kubrick wanted Spencer Tracy for the role of the sheriff-father; Brando gave it to his friend Karl Malden, who had already been on the Pennebaker payroll for three months by then.
Malden was offered the directing job, turned it down, and Brando took the chair himself. Memoirists preserved this exchange: “Remind me, Marlon, why are we making this movie?” — “Because I’ve already paid Malden two hundred thousand.”
The same carousel spun through the screenwriters. Peckinpah was fired, Calder Willingham was hired and fired too, and Guy Trosper became the final writer. When Malden was asked many years later who had really written the story, he answered: “There is one answer to your question — Marlon Brando, the genius of our time.”
The most interesting turn came twelve years later. The story Peckinpah had devised for someone else’s film, he directed himself in 1973 — Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. And the same thing happened there: MGM took the picture away from him and recut it their own way.
The shoot was meant to take sixty days. It began on December 2, 1958, and ended on June 2, 1959 — half a year. In the Los Angeles Times (November 8, 1959), Rosenberg offered a piece of arithmetic that would make any producer’s eye twitch: more than a million feet of film had been shot, 250,000 feet printed. The average figure for a film with a comparable budget was 150,000 feet shot and 40,000 printed. In other words, Brando used seven times the normal amount of film and printed six times as much.
The budget began at $1.8 million and ended at six. The deal structure was unusual even then: Brando received a $150,000 fee and one hundred percent of the profits, while Paramount financed everything and took the distribution rights — about 27% of the gross (“the only deal of its kind,” as Daily Variety wrote on August 1, 1958). To break even, the film needed to gross around $13 million; it made 4.3.
The shoot was not smooth in the most literal sense. In the prison-break scene, Slim Pickens struck Brando with the butt of a rifle harder than he was supposed to; Brando’s forehead had to be stitched, and some scenes were later filmed to show only the uninjured side of his face. For the drunken card-game scene, Brando got three actors genuinely drunk on Old Crow bourbon. He himself once passed out on set and put it down to exhaustion. Meanwhile, on March 17, 1959, his wife Anna Kashfi filed for divorce, and in April the case was settled with a $500,000 payment.
Malden later joked that he bought a house in Hollywood with the money he earned during that production, while Brando called it “the house Jack built.”
This is where the darkest part begins, and the sources diverge so sharply that I won’t pretend to know the truth. Howard Hampton’s essay for Criterion lays out the path this way: the first rough cut was eight hours, then four and a half, then three. Criterion’s “10 Things I Learned” note mentions “rumors of more than five hours.” The AFI catalog, drawing on 1959 publications, gives “approximately four hours and forty minutes.” Eight, five, four forty-two — three different versions of the same cut, each traced back to someone who either saw it with their own eyes or heard from someone who did.
The fact on which everyone agrees: the studio assembled the final 141 minutes without Brando. He delivered his version while flying in on weekends to edit from New York, where he was shooting Sidney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind, then burned out, left post-production, and did not approve the film. Exactly the same proportion repeated itself in his career: he never sat in the director’s chair again.
Most conspicuously, an entire plotline vanished. According to the script — and Rosenberg himself, in The New York Times of March 26, 1961 — the film contained “a fleeting love story between Brando and a Chinese girl”: the part was played by Lisa Lu, “the niece of a Chinese fisherman,” who tended Rio’s wounds while his gang laid low in a fishing village. Criterion’s production notes describe the same scene more bluntly — Rio rapes the woman. Brando could not bring himself to play it: he got drunk to enter the role, arrived too drunk, the shoot was postponed until the following week, the same thing happened again, and after several attempts the scene was thrown out altogether.
Also lost were the Sonora prison episodes, where the thirst for revenge built up, and the original flashback structure. The ending had to be reshot, too: in the original version, Louisa died in the gunfight — in the new one, she survived, which required a separate shooting day in Monterey on October 14, 1960. A year later, the studio brought in a second unit to shoot connective material and somehow assemble the film into a coherent whole.
And here lies the strongest discovery in the entire story. Brando recorded his thoughts on every scene onto a tape recorder, and those recordings survived: 33 minutes of his voice explaining what was supposed to happen are included on the Criterion disc. The plan of the film survives in sound, while the film itself does not. Listening to a director describe a nonexistent movie is an experience of its own kind.
No one renewed the copyright on One-Eyed Jacks, and the film entered the public domain. Everything else follows from that. Anyone could print copies, and they did: pan-and-scan versions that chop the widescreen composition in half at the sides, plus sound that one critic said, in one edition, seemed to have been recorded through a speakerphone. One collector, trying to find the best transfer, bought nineteen different DVDs and still maintained that the cleanest image was on Paramount’s 1994 LaserDisc, made from an internegative.
The economics work against us here. As long as the film is in the public domain, a restored version is not protected from copying, which means the investment cannot be recouped, which means the studio does not pay. In 2014, Hollywood Elsewhere estimated a full restoration at $90–100,000 and added that Paramount was almost certainly not going to spend the money. Even after Brando’s death, the press wrote that the studio’s resentment ran so deep that in 1971 it had to be specifically persuaded to let him onto its lots for The Godfather.
In 2015, director Stevan Riley, maker of the documentary Listen to Me Marlon, said that Brando’s heirs had found the negative. Hope immediately surfaced in the press: what if the longer version was sitting in those same cans? It wasn’t. They restored the theatrical film.
The 2016 work is a separate pleasure for an engineer. The original 35mm eight-perf VistaVision negative was scanned in 6K on a Northlight scanner, with the digital restoration done in 4K. The negative had partly faded, and the blue color layer was replaced using the Y layer of a separation master; duplicate sections spliced into the negative were replenished with scans of all three separation masters, while vintage dye-transfer prints served as the color reference. The sound was recovered from the original mag master. The premiere took place in the Cannes Classics section on May 16, 2016; Criterion and Arrow released the DVD and Blu-ray, and in 2018 the film was added to the National Film Registry.
It also turned out that no one won the fight over the frame: the scan was done at the full 1.5:1 aperture, critics demanded 1.66, and the release came out in 1.85:1 — precisely the version that had made everyone wince. In the same essay, Hampton notes that even if the footage were found, the film’s knots would not come undone, because Brando had tied them deliberately. That argument strikes me as half convincing and half convenient: it was published alongside the release, and it sounds like an excuse for a studio that will not have to pull anything off the shelf anyway.
VistaVision has a beautiful story. One-Eyed Jacks remained the last American film shot entirely in the format for six decades — but the format did not die; it moved into the special-effects workshop: the scene in which a starship chases Princess Leia’s ship in A New Hope was shot on it, as were parts of Tron, Aliens, Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump, and The Dark Knight. Then, in 2024, Brady Corbet shot The Brutalist on VistaVision; in 2025, Paul Thomas Anderson shot One Battle After Another and Lanthimos Bugonia, and new titles are already scheduled for 2026. Eight-perf film returned to service as an aesthetic choice after half a century of working in the back room.
Two hundred and eighty-two minutes in the editing room, 141 in theaters, and one tape recorder holding the director’s voice, explaining what those 141 minutes do not contain.