Marlon Brando - Top 30 Highest Rated

I understand that this will be an extremely controversial conclusion, and that I will get a lot of flak for it, but I think that Marlon Brando's top thirty list of movies is more distinguished than Elvis Presley's.

My other main comment is that I agree with your top five and their order.

*one comment--While I think The Godfather is Brando's best movie, and I would rate it #1, I find this rating of 9.6 (which draws from general ratings) a bit over the top. I think the movie stacks the deck in favor of a family of gangsters. For example, the intimidation of the Hollywood producer. The producer is given a piggish sexual predator motivation, so when they dump the horse's head into his bed, it is a "he had it coming to him" moment. How would it have played if the producer had simply refused to cast Johnny Fontaine because another actor was a better choice for the role?


**I went through your whole list at you tube, and could not find Charlton Heston. Is he coming soon?

Hi John, a Heston video will definitely pop up eventually. Are you a fan? Ben-Hur is my favorite movie.

It's ladies turn next, my next few videos will focus on Hollywood goddesses of the 40s and 50s.

The high rating for The Godfather is the result of unusually high scores at IMDB and rotten tomatoes, the film came very close to a perfect 10. Higher than Kane! Is it the IMDB's highest rated film? For a while it was The Shawshank Redemption, a good film but highly overrated IMO, I'm sure there are some people who think the same way about Godfather. I prefer it to the highly praised sequel, probably because of Brando.

"are you a fan?"

A Heston fan, yes. A Ben-Hur 1959 fan? Not so much. You must like that movie much more than I do.

I prefer the 1920's version, actually. Done on a grander scale.

*One thing about the 1959 version. Have you ever noticed that the rotator thing on the chariot wheel wouldn't work as with a four horse team, the horses would bump together and one could never get close enough to rip up the other guys wheel. I began to think about that once when re-watching the film. I used freeze frame to figure out what was happening. The chariot tongue, rather than being in the middle between the second and third horses, was moved to the side, between the third and fourth horses for Boyd, and to between the first and second horses for Heston. This allowed the chariots to get close enough for that thing to possibly work.

I prefer the race in the original, on balance, as it impresses me as reasonably realistic about how such a race would be run and how cheating could actually be done.