Close-Ups on the Outcasts
Arthur Penn discusses the first “revisionist” Western and Bonnie & Clyde’s link to the genre.
By: Henry Cabot Beck 05/01/2008
TW: I was just watching The Missouri Breaks and Little Big Man on TV a few days ago. It seems your pictures run on cable frequently nowadays.
AP: I think so. Keep them coming!
After watching The Missouri Breaks, Bonnie and Clyde and Little Big Man, I noticed the theme of innocence often appears in your pictures.
And evil. I think Brando’s character, for example, in The Missouri Breaks, is the quintessence of evil. He’s brought in to just do gratuitous killing with people he doesn’t even know.
Like Chigurh in No Country for Old Men; he’s a force of nature.
Exactly. Yeah, I think that’s true. He is evil personified.
Brando did a great job.
Didn’t he? I thought so.
At the time, some thought he was being indulgent in the part, but I get the feeling he was doing exactly what you wanted.
Exactly. We knew each other well because we’d done The Chase together years earlier.
An actor I know thinks that in The Missouri Breaks and Superman, Brando is in his Claude Rains phase.
Well, he’s doing a whole bunch of people. That was the whole point. We started looking for a character, and we looked at four or five, and I said “why don’t you do them all so we never know who you are.” And that’s what stuck.
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