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Brando and Malden ride again in Criterion's restored 'One-Eyed Jacks'

The 1961 Western stars Marlon Brando as a gunslinger seeking revenge against his former partner, played by Karl Malden.

It's hard to think of so singular an actor as Marlon Brando having a steady onscreen partner, but Karl Malden came pretty close. He was Mitch, the spiteful mama's boy to Brando's Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. He was Father Barry, the streetwise priest who helps Brando's Terry Malloy develop a conscience in On the Waterfront. Malden could always be counted on to provide ballast for Brando's mercurial gifts.

In the 1961 Western One-Eyed Jacks, new to the Criterion Collection, the relationship takes on an Oedipal dimension. Malden's Dad Longworth - even the name is Oedipal - abandons his gun-slinging partner Rio (Brando) after a Mexican bank job. Rio does his time, then seeks out his Dad in Monterrey for revenge with more delays than Hamlet. Dad is now a sheriff with a wife and a stepdaughter. He's on the side of the law. But he's still an evil cuss.

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One-Eyed Jacks was a thorny production, ultimately taken out of the director's hands and recut by Paramount Pictures. That director, in his only credit behind the camera, was Brando, who reportedly turned in an eight-hour rough cut. Remarkably, the film still works. It's a moody Western shot through with a sensuousness hard to imagine from the original choice for director, Stanley Kubrick. In both his simmering performance and his detour-laden stewardship, Brando taps into the story's mythological heart. And he's got his partner, now his enemy, along for the ride.