The Big Picture
Marlon Brando’s role in
The Freshman
humorously reflected his iconic
The Godfather
character, showcasing his comedic talent.
The Freshman
serves as a great college comedy caper, offering a gateway for younger viewers to appreciate
The Godfather
.
The film benefited from Brando’s involvement, adding depth and poignancy to the role.
Some actors’ legacies will always be dominated by one defining role, and for Marlon Brando, it was ironically one he was never expected to have. Brando was initially a breakthrough actor in the 1950s thanks to the realism and emotional honesty that he brought from his experiences on stage to the big screen; his film roles in classics like On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire captured the intimacy of a New York theater. As detailed in William J. Mann’s excellent biography The Contender, Brando increasingly felt disillusioned by his work in the film industry due to current political issues, even though it still had value to him. Even if he didn’t even accept the Academy Award for Best Actor for his work in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, he showed that he still enjoyed the role of Don Corleone with his self-reflexive performance in the underrated 1990 comedy The Freshman.
The Godfather
Don Vito Corleone, head of a mafia family, decides to hand over his empire to his youngest son, Michael. However, his decision unintentionally puts the lives of his loved ones in grave danger.
Release Date March 14, 1972
Director Francis Ford Coppola
Runtime 175 minutes
Writers Mario Puzo , Francis Ford Coppola
Production Company Paramount Pictures, Alfran Productions
What Is ‘The Freshman’ About, and Who Does Marlon Brando Play In It?
The Freshman starred a young Matthew Broderick (in one of the few post-Ferris Bueller’s Day Off roles where he still looked relatively young) as film student Clark Kellogg. Clark is trying to find himself as a young man and artist in a way that’s not dissimilar from Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone in The Godfather, an aspect that director Andrew Bergman hones in on. Clark gets the “offer he can’t refuse” to start working for Carmine Sabatini (Brando), an “importer” of foreign goods that just so happens to bear a significant resemblance to the most famous character in gangster movie history. Clark must decide whether he wants to remain associated with Sabatini; while it yields him obvious advantages, he’s worried that a deal with someone who appears to be a local mobster could soon get him into serious trouble.
1:09
Related Marlon Brando Prevented a Promising Actor From Being in ‘The Godfather’ In a different world, it would’ve been Burt Reynolds, and not Al Pacino, who was starring as Michael Corleone.
Even though it was a satirical role, Brando clearly took it seriously, which is something he’d been hesitant to do in recent years. Due to the obvious nature of the plot, Brando never appeared in The Godfather: Part II, and left Robert De Niro to give a proper sendoff to the character of Vito Corleone with his role as a younger version of the character; just as Brando’s role as Vito in The Godfather had won him an Oscar for Best Actor (which he refused), the Academy Awards honored De Niro with the Best Supporting Actor trophy for The Godfather: Part II (in a ceremony he was absent for, although he did show up in person to win Best Actor for Raging Bull). Unfortunately, by the time that Coppola had asked to work with Brando again, he had once again descended into the self-obsessed madness that had dominated his work prior to The Godfather. The stories from the set of Apocalypse Now are notorious, and effectively ended the fruitful partnership that existed between Brando and Coppola.
‘The Freshman’ Didn’t Need Marlon Brando, But He Elevated It
Although Brando may have given up on “serious acting” following The Godfather and his work the same year in Bernardo Bertolucci’sThe Last Tango In Paris, The Freshman allowed him to poke fun at his past roles without completely embarrassing himself. Even though Sabatini (who goes by the nickname “Jimmy The Toucan”) is a character that plays off of a caricature version of Brando’s The Godfather character, he represents the same sort of influence, danger, whimsy, integrity, and insight that Vito had. It’s a funny film, and Brando was a seasoned enough comedian to know that playing it straight would be even funnier than appearing as a farcical version of the Don.
It was also evidently a role that energized him. Brando’s demands for his main role as Jor-El in 1978’s Superman: The Movie were notorious, and he continued to do embarrassing work on projects like Don Juan DeMarco and The Island of Dr. Moreau as he coasted off of the success of The Godfather. The Freshman was funny and smart enough that it didn’t necessarily even “need Brando” — there were enough great actors who could do a Brando impression that the film likely would have been successful regardless. However, having Brando involved was just the icing on the cake. Bergman was a seasoned comedy director, but there was a poignancy that Brando brought to his scenes as a “reflexive career man” that no one else could have had.
‘The Freshman’ Is Great Even If You Haven’t Seen ‘The Godfather’
The brilliant thing about The Freshman is that regardless of whether the viewer has seen The Godfather, the film works as a perfect college comedy caper. Broderick’s character essentially goes through a similar “crisis of confidence” as he determines whether he should work for Brando that Pacino’s Michael does in The Godfather; it just so happens that Broderick is dealing with illegal animal smuggling and not the mafia. As he had proven in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Broderick was perfect at playing youthful characters trying to discover their identities, and The Freshman’s Clark certainly had more integrity than Ferris. Broderick’s likability, Bergman’s visual gags, and the depiction of college film culture make The Freshman the perfect “gateway film” to get younger viewers interested in the 1972 classic. How many kids watched The Freshman when they were younger, then realized what they were missing when they grew up and watched The Godfather?
Ironically, The Freshman actually felt like a better tribute to The Godfather than the one that was released the same year. 1990 also saw the release of the long-in-development The Godfather: Part III, a sequel that saw Pacino returning to the role of an older Michael who now reflects on his life as he supports his daughter (played in a notoriously panned performance by Sofia Coppola before she became one of the greatest directors of her generation). Compared to The Godfather: Part III, which seems to treat the familial aspect of the franchise as melodrama, The Freshman shows why someone like Clark would have been able to earn the respect of Brando’s character. Perhaps The Freshman is the closest thing that film fans will ever get to The Godfather: Part IV.
The Freshman is available to rent on Prime Video in the U.S.
Rent on Prime Video