Burn! (1969)
Trivia
Marlon Brando once said this film contains "the best acting I've ever done."
Evaristo Márquez, who played rebel leader José Dolores in the film, was not an actor, but rather a poor villager from San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, whom director Gillo Pontecorvo discovered while scouting locations in that country. He convinced Marquez to star opposite Marlon Brando, though the studio had originally wanted Sidney Poitier.
Marlon Brando in his autobiography says that Gillo Pontecorvo was one of the three best directors he ever worked with. The other two were Elia Kazan and Bernardo Bertolucci.
The setting of the film is a fictional sugar cane-producing Caribbean island named "Queimada." In the original script, this fictive island was part of the Spanish empire, which would have been a more accurate historical conceit, since Spain, rather than Portugal, was the dominant European power in the Caribbean. The Spanish government of Francisco Franco pressured the filmmakers to alter the script, and since Portugal accounts for a considerably smaller share of international box-office receipts than Spain, the producers did the economically expedient thing by making the Portuguese the bad guys. No Portuguese is actually spoken in the film, but rather various forms of Spanish.
Sir William Walker, a real historical figure portrayed in this film by Marlon Brando, was neither British nor knighted. Walker was an American adventurer, and his title of "sir" was one he adopted on his own.
Director Gillo Pontecorvo resisted studio pressure to cast Steve McQueen and Sidney Poitier in the leads.
When working conditions became impossible in Colombia, Marlon Brando insisted that the location be moved. Even though there was less than two weeks on the schedule, the film was finished in Morocco.
United Artists rapidly lost faith in this film as the budget spiraled out of control. Much to director Gillo Pontecorvo's horror, it was re-edited by an editor who specialized in putting trailers together.
Marlon Brando chose to appear in this film over Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Arrangement (1969). He also missed out on a major role in Ryan's Daughter (1970) due to delays in this film's production. In his autobiography, Brando said "I did some of my best acting in 'Burn!'"
The film's original title was "Quemada" (the spanish word for "burnt"), as the action took place in a Spanish colony. When the Spanish government officially complained and threatened a boycott of the film (objecting to the script's supposedly anti-Spanish bias), Gillo Pontecorvo agreed to alter the setting to a Portuguese island, and the release title became "Queimada" ("burnt" in Portuguese).
The original Italian language version is longer by twenty minutes than the English-dubbed U.S. version.
During a 2003 filmed interview, director Gillo Pontecorvo said that although he and Marlon Brando quarreled during the filming of this film, some years later, Brando offered him a chance to direct a movie about a Native American reservation.
Evaristo Márquez said in an interview (November 1, 2009) that in several occasions, when Marlon Brando refused to act, he was the "peacemaker" between director Gillo Pontecorvo and the legendary actor.
Marlon Brando always claimed that making this film was the most unpleasant professional experience of his career - but also usually added that he thought it the best film he had ever been in.
In the commentary for The Godfather (1972), discussing how difficult it was to convince Paramount studio heads to cast Marlon Brando, then deemed box office poison, Francis Ford Coppola said that this movie, using the actual title instead of Burn, was an incredible film with a great performance by Brando, but that the movie bombed like so many others he'd starred in.
