8. Marlon Brando - The Island Of Dr Moreau
There is a school of thought which posits the notion that after his scintillating performance in Apocalypse Now in 1979, Marlon Brando spent the rest of his career messing about. To be fair, he'd spent a good chunk of time messing about before Apocalypse Now. For his previous movie, 1978's Superman, he received a massive fee plus a cut of the gross which added up to a whopping $16m for 13 days filming as the Man Of Steel's Dad. Despite this obscene remuneration he refused to learn his lines choosing instead to have cue cards secreted around the set. Like Orson Welles, the Pay-Check for this movie was earmarked for a personal project - a TV mini-series which was to be the Native American version of Roots. Superman has all the hallmarks of a paycheck movie and certainly Brando's financial demands for a paltry 15 minutes of screen time would have seen this going on the list until I watched the Island Of Dr Moreau (1996) a couple of nights ago. Brando really could not be bothered. His unremitting disinterest in this film means: he wears a smock throughout the film, adopts a dreadful English accent, wears false teeth, and spends a fair portion of the film wearing either a light dusting of self-raising flour or a snood. Because he was Marlon Brando he was allowed to play a scene wearing an ice bucket on his head. His reason being, I was just so bored, I didnt know what else to do. Brando then demanded that the dwarf he had befriended on set, who sported prosthetic makeup which made him look like an ASDA Chinese chicken drumstick, should be in all of his scenes. The piano duet they share midway through the movie is the most horribly odd and pointless scene in movie history. By this point in his career, Brando couldn't even motivate himself to use cue cards. Instead he wore a radio ear-piece through which his lines were fed to him. David Thewlis, who floats through the movie with a permanent look of bafflement and bemusement perfectly matching that of the audience, claims that Brando often accidentally tuned in to a police radio frequencies and at one point he intoned in a very actorly manner: Theres a robbery at Woolworth's...