cult film freak: BRANDO AND BRYNNER IN THE WARTIME THRILLER OF 'MORITURI'

Marlon Brando and Yul Brynner in MORITURI Year: 1965 Grade: B— upon a **1/2 star rating

During Marlon Brando's lost decade — of box office and critical failures in-between ONE-EYED JACKS and THE GODFATHER — he played the unlikeliest of World War II-movie heroes in MORITURI...

Which is where Brando's Robert Crain begins... in an expository mission-setup sequence with Trevor Howard, who finds Marlon's pacifist German character hiding out in India before thrusting him into the complicated task...

Marlon Brando in Morituri

Going undercover aboard a freighter ship — powered by Germans pretending to be Swedish to avoid detection — that carries rubber (of all things) to provide the Nazis a way of getting around Europe... and the goal's to disable random anti-capture explosives so the allies can steal the goods...

So the action mostly takes place onboard the steely, gray-walled vessel captained by proud German Yul Brynner, a good man despite the side he's on, and that he was born into... long before Hitler took command...

Hans Christian Blech in Morituri with Marlon Brando

Brando, however, barely seems like the cold-blooded Nazi he's impersonating while complications sustain aboard the ship... a potentially tense Alfred Hitchcock style setting... including a group of blue collar prisoners planning a violent break and of course, the token distressed damsel...

Which, in the case of gorgeous Jewish refugee Janet Margolin, is a plot-point that should have been abandoned altogether... if simply to provide more screen-time to overall edgy scene-stealer and supposed "fellow Reich Officer" Hans Christian Blech: who Brando befriends to find those bombs quicker...

Martin Benrath in Morituri with Marlon Brando

But our man has too many people to contend with, so his initially narrowed and dangerous errand becomes an afterthought, turning a wartime thriller into a rather bland ensemble melodrama that does, however, have some decent moments and, not surprisingly, good acting...

Though falling short given that the dream cast, particularly Brando and Brynner, are too relaxed for the promised bombastic combination of opposing polar-opposites: basically, either character could have been played by anyone.