Alaina Huffman, Camille Razat, Sofia Masson and others naked in Waltzing With Brando (2024)

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Back in the early 70s, an architect named Bernard Judge fell under the spell of Marlon Brando, who dreamt of building an environmentally friendly habitat on an uninhabited island that was virtually inaccessible. The two men spent years and millions of dollars on it. It was so costly that Brando had to return to the Hollywood he hated in order to finance his dream. At one time he was entitled to 10% of The Godfather, based upon his back-end deal, but he sold his interest to raise more for his fanciful island project.

The Hollywood money eventually ran out, so Brando found another investor, one who required so many compromises that architect Judge finally walked away from a project on which he had spent six years of his life. Brando completed the project without him, but got little chance to enjoy it because it was wiped out by a once-in-a-generation storm, something Judge had told him was likely in the location Brando had insisted on.

Judge eventually wrote a book about those years, “Waltzing with Brando, Planning a Paradise in Tahiti.” The book is an illustrated narrative about the dynamics of their architect/client collaboration on an attempt to live in nature without despoiling the local culture, the island’s ecology, or the surrounding marine life. That book is the basis of this film.

The film is more about the dreamers than the dream. It is practically a love poem to Marlon Brando, the supremely talented, supremely eccentric, self-indulgent man whose championship of civil rights and the environment was far more important to him than acting. (He used his Oscar as a doorstop.) The author of this cinema love sonnet is Billy Zane, who produced the film and played Brando.

Does that sound to you like a project doomed to ridicule? Billy Zane playing Brando?

You’re wrong.

Billy didn’t just play Brando, he was Brando. If Marlon himself, as great an actor as he was, could come back to life at that age, he could not do as good a job as Zane, because he would screw it up with some of his wild, overly stylized ideas. I swear to you that you will think they used actual footage of Brando in this film, but they didn’t. That’s always Billy, looking exactly like Brando, sounding exactly like him, capturing his charm, his smile, and his eccentricities to perfection, and even re-creating some of his greatest movie scenes so well that you can’t tell you’re looking at a copy.

IMDb: 6.4

Rotten Tomatoes: 63% on the Tomatometer, but 93% on the Popcorn Meter.

I can see what some critics caviled about. I’m not unaware that the film spends a lot of time on stock footage of waterfalls, exotic lagoons, young men spearing fish, old men playing ukuleles, and women dancing in grass skirts. I don’t care. I’m with the popcorn eaters on this one. I think the movie is ah-ight. It’s basically a fascinating story; the film contains a lot of humor; and I don’t mind looking at beautiful waterfalls.

And Billy Zane is dazzling in this role.

I liked the movie enough to buy the glossy paperback book on which it is based. Best five bucks I spent all year. It’s filled with photographs, gossip, and every detail you can imagine about this quixotic project.

Videos

Camille Razat has appeared her many times before.

Camille, being French, has a significant presence on Charlie’s site as well, including full-frontal nudity.

Alaina Huffman did one distant nude scene a quarter-century ago in a film called Pendulum. (My review):