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It’s 1972, and, in front of a film crew standing in a Parisian flat, Marlon Brando is giving a pep talk to his penis. The 47-year old actor was supposed to be performing a full-frontal nude scene for his latest film, Last Tango in Paris, but, as he described it in his autobiography Songs My Mother Taught Me, it became “one of the more embarrassing experiences of my professional career”.  

It was such a cold day that, as Brando shamefacedly confessed, “my penis shrank to the size of a peanut. It simply withered.” His body went into what he called “full retreat”, and an embarrassed and stressed Brando started to pace the set, hoping for something to change. Then he had an idea. 

As he later wrote: “I’ve always had a strong belief in the power of mind over matter, so I concentrated on my private parts, trying to will my penis and testicles to grow; I even spoke to them.” For all of his stirring efforts, it did not work. “My mind failed me. I was humiliated.” He asked his director for an hour’s grace, and bravely informed the crew that he was not giving up, but as he noted: “I could tell from their faces that they had given up on me.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, he decided that “I simply couldn’t play the scene that way”, and so it was cut from the finished film. 

Half a century after its initial release, Last Tango in Paris is still a byword for sexual explicitness, even after considerably more shocking films have been released. The words ‘Last Tango in…’ connote a sense of danger and excitement, something that the screenwriter Sally Wainwright wittily played on in her comedy-drama Last Tango in Halifax, about the romance between an elderly couple. 

Its progenitor’s legendary status, half a century after the film’s premiere, rests in large part on its unfettered and frank sex scenes that have established it in the canon of epochal, explicit films about human lust. When it was released in America, it was given a rare ‘X’ certificate, usually reserved for pornography. And yet this is not the main reason for its enduring popularity. What continues to give Last Tango its raw power is not its nudity, or the notorious butter-assisted sodomy scene, but Brando’s astonishingly raw and visceral performance; the last true lead that he undertook in cinema, and a stunning summation of a remarkable career.  

While Brando was trying and failing to engage in a primitive version of penis puppetry, he could console himself that he was, at least, at the zenith of his resurrected career. He had attracted lavish praise for his iconic performance as Don Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece The Godfather, and had re-established himself as a compelling screen presence after a wilderness period in which he had become synonymous with flops such as Charlie Chaplin’s last film A Countess from Hong Kong and the Turn of the Screw prequel The Nightcomers. 

In 1969, the critic Roger Ebert wrote of him that “[Brando] demands the big salary, but producers have discovered in the last few years that his appeal is unpredictable.” His advice was simple. “My notion is that Brando should retrench. He should abandon attempts to resurrect the “old” Brando and begin a series of small pictures designed to exploit his acting ability.” 

It is unclear whether Brando ever read Ebert’s column. But, while The Godfather could never be described as small, Last Tango in Paris, in which he played a widowed middle-aged American called Paul who embarks on a sado-masochistic love affair with a much younger woman, was a complete change of pace. The film’s premise was based on an erotic fantasy of its Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci’s – a desire to meet a strange woman in an empty apartment and have repeated anonymous sex with her without ever knowing more about her – but its execution went far beyond any kind of cheap titillation. 

Bertolucci had attracted great acclaim for his earlier films The Conformist and The Spider’s Stratagem, which were about, respectively, the descent of a diffident man into politically motivated assassination and a character’s inability to escape the legacy of his antifascist martyr father. Both pictures featured intense performances from their male protagonists, a dreamlike atmosphere and moments of shocking violence – all of which can be found in Last Tango in Paris. But the new film would push the envelope considerably further than its predecessors.  

The director was only in his early 30s, but he was already a filmmaker of considerable note, and actors were keen to work with him. Yet Brando was not the first choice for the lead role in his new film. His initial plan for the casting was to reunite his lead actors from The Conformist, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Dominique Sanda, but Trintignant was, in Bertolucci’s words, “beyond shyness” and informed the director, nearly in tears, that he could not be “à poil”, or naked, on screen. Sanda was pregnant, so she was ruled out, and Bertolucci went to the two European leading men of the moment, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon. 

Belmondo found the script offensive and, in Bertolucci's words, “a piece of obscenity”, and Delon would only agree to take on the role if he could also serve as a producer, something that the director peremptorily refused. Then, quite by chance, Bertolucci was in Rome having dinner with the Italian head of Paramount, who was raving about Brando’s performance in The Godfather, and the director thought “yeah, that’s the one”. 

Luring the famously reclusive and demanding actor was no easy task, but Bertolucci was helped by the fact that Brando had enjoyed The Conformist. When he met the director, the two men felt so awkward in each other’s company, on account of Bertolucci’s not speaking any English, that they were unable to talk for around 15 minutes, until Brando broke the silence by saying “OK, what’s the movie you want to do about?” 

The actor who spent a good deal of time in Tahiti, spoke what the filmmaker described as “a very naïve, sweet Tahitian French”, and the two found a rapport. Bertolucci later claimed: “I spent about three weeks with him, but we never talked about the film; instead we talked about everything else – life and death, girls, the usual.” He also quipped that he learnt English from the famously mumble-prone Brando, “which is why nobody understands me”. 

Yet Brando later wrote in his memoir that, although Bertolucci was “an extremely sensitive and talented man”, his scriptwriting skills were rudimentary, as “he didn’t address himself to the development of characters”. Instead, the director encouraged Brando to turn the role into an extension of himself. Brando wrote: “Bernardo tailored the story to his actors. He wanted me to play myself, to improvise completely and portray Paul as if he were an autobiographical mirror of me… he had me write virtually all my scenes and dialogue.” 

The process was complicated by Bertolucci’s lack of English, so the two communicated in Brando’s unorthodox French and through sign language: one can only imagine how that process went on the day of the butter scene. 

The actress Maria Schneider was cast opposite Brando, after Bertolucci’s next choice for the role, Catherine Deneuve, could not accept it because she, too, was pregnant. The film began shooting on 31 January 1972 in Paris, with Brando joining the set on February 7. As was now usual, the actor had not learned his lines, but this was far from the insuperable problem that it usually was. Bertolucci described how: “I wanted him to forget Paul and remember himself and what was inside him. For him it was a completely new method. He was fascinated by the risk, and afraid of the sense of violation of his privacy.” 

However, Bertolucci was taken aback by the level of intensity that Brando brought to the picture, and his performance. As he later put it: “When I saw him do his first sequence, looking up at the train and crying out, I was shocked. He started at such a violent pitch that I said to myself ‘Maybe I cannot work at the level of this actor.’ I was very scared. My fear lasted for the first week, and then Marlon made me understand that he had the same feeling about me. From that moment on, everything worked very well.” 

This was despite the unorthodox fashion in which Brando attempted to read his dialogue off cue cards. Although the story that, at one point, he asked for his lines to be written on Schneider’s buttocks is apocryphal, she remembered: “Sometimes, he didn’t want to learn his lines, and he’d put them on cue cards around the room, and he’d fix it so the camera angle would always be right so he could read the lines. The cue cards were right behind the camera! One scene, when he rolled his eyes and looked up very dramatically, he was really looking up to read his lines.” 

The difficulty that Brando faced was that the film’s director Bernardo Bertolucci was committed to authenticity at all costs, including asking him and his co-star Maria Schneider to have sex on screen for real. Brando refused. “It would have completely changed the picture and made our sex organs the focus of the story,” he said. 

When the film was completed, its sexual content made it a box office hit in America, where it grossed $16 million. Brando, who had agreed a percentage of the profits, eventually earned over $1 million: an extraordinary amount for a film of this nature. 

Predictably, there was controversy too. There was an Italian private prosecution by Gino Paolo Latin, the prosecutor of Bologna, on the grounds of “obscene content offensive to public decency” and “descriptions and exhibitions of masturbation, libidinous acts and lewd nudity, accompanied off-screen by sounds, sighs and shrieks of climatic pleasure”. It was initially unsuccessful, but, in September 1973, the appellate court in Bologna sentenced Bertolucci, Brando and Schneider to two months in prison and a fine: this was later overturned in December that year by the country’s highest court, the Court of Cassation. 

Nonetheless, it was clear that the film had caused grievous offence in Bertolucci’s home country, and the stress drove Schneider to extreme lengths. She later said in an interview that the controversy “made me go mad. I got into drugs – pot and then cocaine, LSD and heroin – it was like an escape from reality.... I didn’t enjoy being famous at all, and drugs were my escape. I took pills to try and commit suicide, but I survived because God decided it wasn’t the time for me to go.” 

In the UK, meanwhile, the tabloids had a field day with the “Marlon Brando shocker”. The Sunday Mirror announced, with no pun intended, that “it contains scenes guaranteed to knock the bottom out of the back-street porno film-market”. But the BBFC only made 10 seconds of cuts to its most notorious scene, with the examiners’ report stating “the film is certainly not as pornographic as the publicity in the newspapers would have us believe. The buggery scene is not very explicit… the sex is shown with great restraint, a little too much in my opinion, as Paul seems to accomplish the most strenuous sexual athletics with his trousers on.” The edits were later restored, and the film can be seen in all its uncensored glory today. 

Brando remained ambivalent about the film, despite being nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor for it: he lost to Jack Lemmon for Save the Tiger, perhaps unsurprisingly given that he refused to collect his Academy Award for The Godfather the previous year. He wrote in his memoir: “Last Tango in Paris received a lot of praise, though I always thought it was excessive… to this day, I can’t say what [the film] is about. While we were making it, I don’t think Bernardo knew either…it was about many things, I suppose, and maybe someday I’ll know what they are.” 

Others have disagreed. Since its release, everyone from Martin Scorsese to Brad Pitt has praised Brando’s performance, with Scorsese describing the role as “the purest poetry imaginable, in dynamic motion”, and Pitt saying that it is the part that he would most have liked to play, remarking: “Brando. That one hurts.” 

It was no coincidence that the actor never took on such a taxing role again. “Last Tango in Paris required a lot of emotional arm wrestling with myself,” Brando recalled, “and when it was finished, I decided that I wasn’t ever again going to destroy myself emotionally to make a movie. I felt I had violated my innermost self and didn’t want to suffer like that anymore.” 

He might not, in the end, have been fully naked on screen. But the power of his final great performance lies in how he strips himself bare emotionally instead. By the end, he – and the audience – are quite drained. He continued to appear in interesting films and roles, whether as Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, the lawyer Ian McKenzie in A Dry White Season, and, of course, Superman’s father Jor-El. But never again took on a part that stretched him to his limits, leaving so little to the imagination.  

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