The Night of the Following Day (1969)
You know what they do in this country if you kill somebody? They chop your head off. They CHOP your head OFF.
By the late ‘60s, Marlon Brando was spiralling. Once the poster boy for the Method - Stella Adler’s version in particular - his chaotic personal life, chronic immaturity, and poor business sense had cast a long shadow over both his career and legacy. The pop culture Brando of The Wild One (1953) and the method actor Brando of On the Waterfront (1954) felt like distant memories after a string of box-office flops that had left him disillusioned and even more difficult to work with. As he puts it in his autobiography Songs My Mother Taught Me, he was firmly in his “Fuck You years”, seething his way through an ill-advised five-picture deal with Universal that came to a whimper of an end with The Night of the Following Day.
Loosely based on Lionel White’s 1953 novel The Snatchers1, The Night of the Following Day is your standard kidnap thriller: a Girl (Pamela Franklin) has no sooner touched down in Paris when she abducted by her Chauffeur (Brando) and Leer (Richard Boone) and whisked off to a grim Brittany beach house, where Friendly (Jess Hahn) and his heroin-snorting sister The Blonde (Rita Moreno) are waiting. In true genre picture fashion, as soon as the ransom demand is sent, the gang start to unravel: The Blonde’s heroin use makes her unreliable, a friendly gendarme (Gérard Buhr) keeps popping up at inopportune moments, and Leer quickly reveals himself to be a sexual sadist with an eye for the Girl and a double-cross in the works. Naturally, it all goes to pot. The romantic relationship between the Chauffeur and The Blonde disintegrates into jealous recrimination (based on a misunderstanding that could have been easily sorted out), the ransom drop goes violently wrong, the Girl falls victim to Leer’s perverted whims, and it all culminates in a sandy shoot-out that leaves most of the gang dead … or does it?2
The Night of the Following Day is less a movie than it is a fraying patchwork of outtakes and compromises. Like much of Brando’s output (especially in the ‘60s), the production was more interesting than the finished film.3 While Brando wasn’t in full sabotage mode (as he was on 1962’s Mutiny on the Bounty), he was still characteristically recalcitrant. Even though the movie had been set up primarily to fulfil the last of his five-picture commitment - even Universal wanted shut of him at this point - Brando made a point of butting heads with director Hubert Cornfield, commencing an almost immediate war of attrition. According to Marion Rosenberg, Elliott Kastner’s personal assistant and “de facto line producer” on The Night of the Following Day, “Marlon just trod on him like an ant. The one thing Marlon can do, like all movie stars, is sniff out people who are intimidated. Marlon in particular knows when someone is afraid, and he uses it and then despises that person for his fear.”
This slightly overstates Brando’s self-control. Rather than a concerted, premeditated effort to destroy any given collaborator, Brando’s rebellion always had a touch of the tantrum about it, and his work on The Night of the Following Day is no exception. He refused to call Cornfield by his real name, instead addressing him as “Herbert”; he refused to say the lines as written, opting instead to improvise (badly4); he insisted on giving the characters names that weren’t in the script, which proved impossible to edit out of the final cut; he showed up drunk (when he showed up at all) and wouldn’t stop grimacing into the camera5. When Cornfield finally called it quits towards the end of the shoot, Richard Boone stepped in and resolutely refused to sanction Brando’s buffoonery: “Hey, asshole, don’t pull that shit on me! Quit phoning in your lines.” But by that point the damage had been done.
In Brando’s (partial) defence, The Night of the Following Day was never going to be a good movie. It is simplistic by design, a paring down of the thriller tropes until it becomes a strange combination of eccentric and dull. Brando and Moreno are saddled with a couple of terrible blonde wigs - Brando’s scalp appears to be halfway down his forehead, hers an official Apollo 8 crew member6 - and Brando’s part is written as a kind of middle-aged, oversensitive beatnik, while Moreno gives it her best shot as the world’s most unconvincing heroin addict. Casting Have Gun Will Travel’s Richard Boone as a sadistic pervert might have looked interesting on paper, but Boone’s rheumy-eyed psycho feels rote and uninspired - especially when Al Lettieri is right there, playing a bit part as a pilot when he wasn’t frantically rewriting the script. And poor Pamela Franklin is given nothing to do but snuffle and suffer. Only Jess Hahn and Gérard Buhr appear to be playing human beings. Both were reliable character actors with long careers in French cinema, and both offer a pleasing low-key menace, but they’re essentially in a different - and only slightly better - movie. They can’t save a muddled screenplay that has the gang rigorously plan the abduction and ransom demand, only to go in guns (and bombs) blazing when it comes time to pick up the money.
The Brando-beleaguered Cornfield was no strange to B-movie noir - he’d directed adaptations of Gil Brewer’s Lure of the Swamp (1957) and Charles Williams’s All the Way (as The 3rd Voice in 1960) - but his direction here tries unsuccessfully to paper the cracks in the story by straining for artistry. Low angles, tight close-ups, and wordless long-shot sequences aspire to a Jean-Pierre Melville-like aesthetic, but just feel empty. Penelope Huston in Sight and Sound suggested that Cornfield had “succumbed to the French flu of the ‘significant’ thriller”, and that there might - just might - be a better movie trying to claw its way out of there. I’m not so sure. Regardless, while Cornfield’s concept of the film was clearly more cerebral and anti-genre than his previous work, the fractured shoot, his own inexperience, the low budget, and an uncooperative leading man meant it would never be realised.
Some critics picked up on the intent if not the reality, with Time calling The Night of the Following Day “a surreal seminar in the poetics of violence” and citing Brando’s performance as his best since One-Eyed Jacks (1961), but most noted that the movie was inconsistent at best and that Brando was making a habit of wasting his prestigious talent on trash. The actor was typically dismissive of the movie, saying it made “about as much sense as a rat fucking a grapefruit”, and would later claim that he made it purely for the money.
The problem was, that “money” was running out. He was no longer worth his salary. It didn’t help that The Night of the Following Day arrived in cinemas shortly after the excruciating sex farce fiasco of Candy (1968)7. With almost a dozen commercial failures under his belt, Brando was no longer the box office golden boy of 1958 and remained at risk of becoming a has-been at the age of forty-five while rival Paul Newman was riding high. In short, he was the kind of actor who would be compelled to strap on a Lucky Charms accent in a Michael Winner film. While he would enjoy something of a career resurgence after The Godfather (1972), the fundamental problem remained - with rare exceptions, Brando just wasn’t interested in acting.
Brando’s fellow cast members would fare better: Moreno would go on to success in theatre, television and movies; Franklin starred in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) before forging a lengthy career in television and horror movies; Hahn and Boone would simple continue what they’d been doing before. The only real casualty of The Night of the Following Day would be Hubert Cornfield, who would make just one more movie in 1976 - an adaptation of Charles Exbrayat’s Les Grands Moyens, a crime-comedy about a vengeful Corsican granny - before fading into obscurity. A high price to pay for casting Marlon Brando.
Next Up: “To market to market, to sell your best friend, then split up the money and do it again.”
It’s a nasty little novel, which the movie tries to temper by making the kidnap victim older and removing the nanny character. Apparently Kubrick’s first choice before he opted for another Lionel White novel, Clean Break, which became The Killing (1956). The book also provided inspiration for the real-life kidnapping of four-year-old Éric Peugeot in 1960.
Well, no, it doesn’t. The Night of the Following Day ends with the hackiest twist in the book. Just as the Girl succumbs to her injuries (she’s been tortured and likely raped by Leer), she wakes up on the plane heading to Paris. That’s right, the previous ninety minutes were all a dream. It’s clearly framed as a premonition of sorts, but there’s nothing to suggest it isn’t just an eleventh-hour gotcha.
Much of the behind-the-scenes stuff is taken from Peter Manso’s exhaustive biography Brando. There’s a lot more in there, particularly around the flurry of ex-wives and ex-girlfriends that came to Brittany, Brando’s lord-of-the-manor behaviour, and the actor’s obsession with, and talent for, “Wagnerian” flatulence.
I’m no acting expert, but I firmly believe that good improvisation requires intelligence, which Brando - a sensitive, emotional actor to be sure - did not possess. It’s easy to spot when he goes off-script: he repeats lines, starts fiddling with himself and props, and he suddenly becomes incapable of modulating his performance, swinging between the mutter and the bellow. Brian Cox would have a field day.
The final shot of the movie - a freeze-frame of Brando smiling - was stolen from an outtake because Brando refused to smile.
“But Ray,” I hear you cry, “Apollo 8 launched in 1968 and this was made in 1967 before being shelved for two years, so her wig couldn’t have been a member of the Apollo 8 crew!” To which I retort.
At least Brando looks like he’s having fun in that one, unlike anyone who’s had to sit through it.