Marlon and Maria are the rock, the men accompanying her the hard place.
"Holy shit! He just hit her with an open fist!"
So exclaimed the young yahoo sitting behind me to his best buddy, who too reveled in appreciation of the sudden force exhibited by Brando's hand.
Later, as that same hand, in an act of contrasting gentility, lovingly sponged the weighty, tear shaped breasts of Maria Schneider, it was ,"Oooooh, she's got a hell of a set!" and a chuckling confirmation from his ignoramus in arms.
"Guyyyys," frustratedly sang the poor girl sandwiched between them, trying hard to rise above her lot in life: the company she kept, the kinds of superficial boys she fell in love with, the know-nothing sidekicks that always seemed to accompany them.
You could hear her mission; it expressed itself in purposefully audible sighs, low "Grrrr"s, and terse, semi-comic "Ha ha!"s.
When Brando pinned Maria against the door, and the much ballyhooed butter came out - I had seen this movie many times; danced more Tangos than a Piazzola addict - I feared the worst...not for my girlfriend and I, who were beginning to enjoy this sideshow almost as much as the film itself, but for that poor girl stuck between those two idiots, trapped like Maria and enduring the sorrier fate, as hers was not about good-bad, which has some pleasures, but bad-bad.
"That's it, you guys!," she finally burst, managing, somehow, to wriggle herself free from the tight squeeze that they held on her.
"Where the hell are you going?," they both stupidly asked.
She walked past my girlfriend and I, the shadow of a free, independent, self-sufficient woman against the giant, agonized face of Maria Schneider - a living embodiment of a fleeting thought, the lightning-fast notion that there are lives beyond Brando, beyond the men who sit behind patient patrons in movie theatres and despoil.
