Product Description

Marlon Brando stars as Fletcher Christian, the leader of a mutiny aboard ship ; as Marc Anthony ; as an unhappily married Army general ; as a Japanese interpreter in Okinawa, and as greedy oil tycoon.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: UN
Release Date: 7-NOV-2006
Media Type: DVD

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13387 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2006-11-07
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.66:1
• Formats: Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 6
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds

Features

• This collection of five interesting Brando movies from the Warner library includes some titles not available separately on DVD. Of interest to gay men is Reflections in a Golden Eye where Brando plays a repressed homo soldier. Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR Age: 012569830110 UPC: 012569830110 Manufacturer No: 83011

Amazon.com
As this five-film box set vividly demonstrates, Marlon Brando was, at least in the beginning of his legendary career, not one to rest on his laurels or emerging mythic status. Spanning 1953 to 1980, this collection gathers some of his most challenging and offbeat performances. Some naysayers doubted Brando, he of the Method and mumbles, could do Shakespeare justice, but he acquits himself impressively as Mark Antony in Joseph Mankiewicz's stellar adaptation of Julius Caesar. Though now dicey from a PC standpoint, Brando, unlike Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's, rises above grotesque caricature as a wily Japanese interpreter in The Teahouse of the August Moon, one of his rare forays into comedy. In Mutiny on the Bounty, Brando daringly portrays Fletcher Christian so foppish that he makes Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow look like Errol Flynn in The Sea Hawk. John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye teams Brando with another screen icon, Elizabeth Taylor, in a nasty piece of Southern gothic about sordid doings on a military base. Brando portrays a latent homosexual fixated on young soldier Robert Forrter, who has a penchant for naked horseback riding and sneaking into Taylor's room while she sleeps to fondle her clothing.

Only The Formula, a still timely, yet confusing conspiracy thriller about synthetic fuel, is dispensable, although Brando is compelling to watch in his few scenes opposite fellow Oscar-holdout, George C. Scott. More entertaining than the film is the lively audio commentary with director John Avildson and screenwriter Steve Shagan. Suffice to say, they have little good to say about Scott, disgraced former studio head David Begelman, and, of all people, Christopher Lambert, who would star in another film that Shagan wrote. The Julius Caesar disc contains an excellent bonus, "The Rise of Two Legends," in which Laurence Fishburne refers to Shakespeare as "the Aaron Spelling of his day," and Dennis Hopper praises Brando for taking "the act out of acting." Mutiny is given the two-disc "Special Edition" treatment with a bounty of extras. Most concern the construction of the ship for the film, but we do get the original prologue and epilogue that were excised before the film's release and then restored for its 1967 television broadcast, and not seen since. The Teahouse disc contains an entertaining vintage featurette that follows cast and crew to Japan, while Reflections offers raw on-location footage. All five films are making their domestic DVD debuts. --Donald Liebenson

Customer Reviews

Reflections in a golden eye is golden again
Yes,the disk of relections in a golden eye is indeed in the original golden colored treatment as intended by director John Huston.Restored by Warner Bros you can now see this great film in the version intended by its creator.A unique experience.Forty years ahead of its time.A must for film collectors and admirers of Huston as a director.The color treatment adds immeasurably to the power of the narrative and lends a hypnotic and dreamlike edge to this disturbing and provocative film.Get it.Hard to believe the packaging does not mention the gold in this collection.

Joel Bender

A Special Talent

It isn't merely his brilliant acting and physical beauty, but that extra quality people in show business call "stage presence." Only 2 of these titles (JULIUS CAESAR and TEAHOUSE) are among the very best of his 38 major films, but all 5 are ample proof--if proof is needed--that Marlon Brando is one of our most enduring stars.

JULIUS CAESAR: Shakespeare gets the fancy Hollywood treatment, with a young Brando heading an impressive cast, and he more than holds his own with the likes of James Mason, John Gielgud, and Deborah Kerr. His Marc Antony is a fascinating interpretation.

THE TEAHOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON: In this film of John Patrick's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Brando is the sly Japanese(!) interpreter for a group of Americans in postwar Okinawa. He wouldn't be cast in the part today (they'd find an appropriate Asian actor), but it remains one of his best comic performances.

MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY: A solid remake of the classic, not as good as the original and way too long, but worth a look for Brando's complex portrait of Fletcher Christian. And the cinematography is stunning.

REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE: Perhaps his most offbeat role, as a repressed homosexual Army officer who prefers (nude) Robert Forster to (nude) Elizabeth Taylor. John Huston's film of Carson McCullers's novel is certainly--umm--naked, a kinky but interesting oddity.

THE FORMULA: Brando only has a couple of scenes in this film version of Steve Shagan's bestselling thriller (George C. Scott and Marthe Keller are the actual leads), but it's awesome to watch him and Scott locking horns. Nobody could play a charming villain as well as Brando (see THE GODFATHER), and the subject of this film (the formula of the title) is surprisingly timely.

So, you decide which are your favorite Brando films, but these 5 are all interesting examples of his work.

Admirable in many ways, beautifully staged and photographed and splendidly acted...
The time is late 1948 and the setting is a U.S. Army post in Georgia, bordering on a forest preserve...

A Southern amoral wife called Leonora (Elizabeth Taylor) finds a way for her stream desire in an adulterous affair with Lt. Col. Langdon (Brian Keith), carried on almost openly...

Leonora gives aperture to her forcefulness and vigor in a passion for horses and riding... She is attached to a handsome white horse she calls Firebird and she provokes her husband by telling him that the animal is indeed a stallion with the emotional nature of man...

Leonora's husband (Marlon Brando) is a devious, insecure, impotent Army major, a hidden homosexual preoccupied with an unsociable, lonely rider who canters around the field in the nude and whose sexual emotional stress is diminished, secretively, at the bedside of the major's wife holding her clothes and looking fixedly at her marvelous hot body...

Private Williams (Robert Forster) is another lonely man fascinated by the fiery Leonora and her thoughtful and gentle comments to him... He takes to visiting the Penderton house at night looking attentively in the windows, observing with total recall and complete joy Leonora's nakedness, but also watching the Major in his study...

Keith's neurotic wife (Julie Harris) is well aware of her husband's affair with Leonora but she only feels well from her close friendship with her houseboy, Anacleto (Zorro David), an affected companion who shares her penchant for the arts and is in every way the opposite of her abrupt, strong husband...

Flavored with bitter insinuations and insulting sarcasms, Brando and Taylor's few scenes have enough flames to burn the silver screen... He's a tormented human being while she's delicious but shrill and insensitive... Aware of her physical beauty she fights back when she's rejected, instigating him with her impudent, insolent, shameless manner that offend his very being...