Marlon Brando’s Favorite Role: The Film He Once Called “the Best Acting I’ve Ever Done”

Marlon Brando once revealed that one of his lesser-known films was the project where he gave his best performance. In his 1994 autobiography Songs My Mother Taught Me, co-written with Robert Lindsey, Brando singled out the 1969 historical drama Burn!, also known by its original title Queimada!, as “the best acting I’ve ever done.”

Directed by Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, the film is set in the mid-1800s and follows Brando as Sir William Walker, a British agent provocateur sent to a Portuguese colony in the Caribbean. Walker’s mission is to incite a slave revolt to benefit the sugar trade, and the story explores the power struggles and moral complications that follow.

Brando reflected on the film and its director, saying, “Aside from Elia Kazan and Bernardo Bertolucci, the best director I worked with was Gillo Pontecorvo, even though we nearly killed each other. He directed me in a 1968(9) film that practically no one saw. I played an English spy, Sir William Walker, who symbolized all the evils perpetrated by the European powers on their colonies during the nineteenth century.”

“There were a lot of parallels to Vietnam, and the movie portrayed the universal theme of the strong exploiting the weak. I think I did the best acting I’ve ever done in that picture, but few people came to see it.”

Brando also praised Pontecorvo as one of the few great filmmakers he worked with, noting the director’s previous success with The Battle of Algiers. He described their time filming in Colombia as physically challenging, with intense heat and humidity, and joked about the difficulties of working in such conditions: “Most days the temperature was over 103 degrees, and the humidity made the set a Turkish bath.”

The story of Burn! draws inspiration from real events. The character of Walker is loosely based on American filibuster William Walker, who invaded Nicaragua in 1855. Writers Franco Solinas and Giorgio Arlorio also incorporated ideas from the career of intelligence agent Edward Lansdale and the Cuban Revolution.

The film’s production was a collaboration between Italian and French studios, led by producer Alberto Grimaldi, with international distribution by United Artists. The score was composed by Ennio Morricone, adding to the film’s dramatic and historical tone.

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