It’s hard to believe in hindsight there was ever a time when Marlon Brando was both critically and commercially scorned. But in the late sixties, Brando was at an acting crossroads, attempting to break out of his inarticulate tough-guy roles into something more artful and nuanced. Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) was one of his middling attempts to go mod, but the movie flopped.
Here in the disjointed, often self-consciously oblique 1969 crime thriller Night of the Following Day, Brando tries to resuscitate his old method actor self while floundering around trying to find some motivational center in this oddball psychedelic abduction flick.
Here, Brando’s character gets involved with a mob of scatterbrained misfits—including Rita Moreno as a flaky drug addict, Richard Boone as a sadistic psychopath—in a plot to kidnap a young heiress (future scream queen Pamela Franklin) from the Paris airport and squeeze ransom money out of her wealthy father.
And partly due to the kidnappers’ ridiculously Byzantine instructions for delivering the ransom money (they are psychos and drug addicts, after all), the whole plot becomes a colossal cockup, with the attendant backstabbing and double-crossing—all leading up to a Brando meltdown that brings flashes of the famed actor’s brilliant past but also seems forced and the stuff of self-parody. Although obviously we’re supposed to accept this film as an intense psychodrama, in actuality this is just a sketchy drama full of intense psychos—all of whom get caught up in a banal battle of wills.
Tack on a counterintuitive final scene that leaves too much to the imagination, and you have a film that, despite its talented, charismatic cast, is never really as convincing a cerebral thriller as it clearly has pretensions to be. Optional.