(Credits: Far Out / Paramount Pictures)
Mon 8 December 2025 6:30, UK
It’s one thing to have a lucky charm in your bag or a lipstick that you refuse to leave the house without, but it’s another to insist on taking a movie with you everywhere you go.
For all his talents and legacy on the big screen, Marlon Brando was a strange man. Not only did he have some unique on-set quirks, like finding it amusing to flash his bum at others, refusing to properly learn his lines, and spouting strong opinions whenever he got the chance, but he also had to have a certain movie with him whenever he travelled away from home.
It might sound a little preposterous, but once home video became a thing, Brando really took the meaning of being able to watch a film whenever and wherever a little too literally. According to his son, Christian, there was one specific movie that he liked to keep on his person because (via GQ), “He would watch films over and over again.”
The movie is a rather random pick from 1990, Sidney Lumet’s Q & A. The movie starred Nick Nolte in the leading role, who was actually a friend of Brando’s, with the pair regularly telephoning each other following their introduction via Sean Penn. “We’d talk every day, for quite some time,” Nolte explained in the same profile. “We’d talk of everything. I mean, there wasn’t anything the guy wasn’t fascinated by.”
One thing they sometimes talked about was Q & A, which Brando really seemed to have a special affinity for. “He just wanted to know how I did that. Because there was no indication that I could do a New Yorker type of character, and the racism, and the homosexuality of the transvestites, and reaching down and grabbing things down there. ’Did you really reach down?’ ’Yeah’,” Nolte explained.
It seems like Brando was an avid movie rewatcher, and can you blame him? When you find something that, for whatever reason, you really goddamn love, it can be tempting to constantly retreat into that world whenever you need to experience some comfort and familiarity.
While it might seem like an absolutely random choice, Lumet’s film was well-reviewed when it was released, and it’s arguably one of both Lumet’s and Nolte’s more underrated movies.
A police story with significant emphasis on race, the film was championed by the likes of Roger Ebert, who gave the movie three-and-a-half stars out of four. He wrote in his review, “It is fascinating the way this movie works so well as a police thriller on one level, while on other levels it probes feelings we may keep secret even from ourselves.”
It’s not exactly the kind of movie that you’d reach for over and over like you would a classic comedy or a beloved romantic drama, but Brando had strange tastes. He was happy watching Q & A as many times as possible, even getting the insider scoop about the movie from Nolte himself.
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