One-eyed Jacks (1960)

The only film directed by Marlon Brando is a captivatingly off-beat, slow-burn revenge western that stands as a key staging post on the genre’s frontier between the Freudian, ‘psychological’ dramas of the 1950s and the elegiac, revisionist visions to come. Marlon Brando plays Rio, an outlaw who vows revenge on his former partner ‘Dad’ Longworth (Karl Malden) after the latter took off with the gold and left him to the law following a bank robbery. Released after five years in a Mexican prison, Rio comes back to haunt his former partner, now reformed and an upstanding sheriff in a town along the rugged coastline of Monterey, California. Brando’s brooding and often breathtakingly photographed film is a magnificent achievement of real power and vision.