THE CHASE is one of the few
Marlon Brando films I'd not seen before.
It's big and messy, half-seedy
potboiler, half grand statement on civil rights and the evils of the South (but
poor whites taking the place of black people). Good performances - Janice Rule
(an underrated actress) Robert Duvall, Richard Bradford, James Fox (playing an
American) . Jane Fonda, Angie Dickinson, EG Marshall are just okay and the only
bad part is Robert Redford who is really miscast as a rough guy, escaped
prisoner. He looks like he just stepped off a catwalk not a chain gang.
Getting back to Brando. One of
the (many) great things about Brando's acting is the physicality of it. He has
some of the best fight scenes in his film resume of any actor and his sense of
inhabiting space within a scene is intuitive. One of the most unpleasant things
I've ever seen in a movie is the scene here when Brando receives a slow, sadistic
beating from a mob of bullies yet you can't take your eyes off Brando, how he
reacts to this. The greatest actor of all time? I think so.
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