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The 1960s weren’t a great decade for Marlon Brando, and the period reached its nadir with this ill-advised adaptation of Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s erotic bestseller. “Candy” follows the sexual adventures of teenager Candy Christian (Ewa Aulin), an almost otherworldly blonde bombshell: She literally descends to Earth from space. Among her many suiters are a boozing Welsh poet (Richard Burton), a Mexican gardener (Ringo Starr), a juggling hunchback (Charles Aznavour), a lascivious surgeon (James Coburn), and a right-wing general (Walter Matthau).
And then there’s Brando as Grindl, an Indian guru who agrees to guide Candy through her journey. But when his brown makeup washes off during sex, Candy is horrified to discover he’s actually her father, whose brain was damaged during a surgery performed by Dr. Coburn. It’s little wonder she decides to leave Earth and return to outer space.
Defiantly bucking against the mainstream critical consensus, Roger Ebert awarded “Candy” three stars, saying it was “a lot better than you might expect, with scenes and lines of high comedy.” Yet he thought Brando’s performance wasn’t “very successful,” even though “the idea is good.” Renata Adler of The New York Times summed up the majority critical opinion, writing, “The movie, directed by Christian Marquand, manages to compromise, by its relentless, crawling, bloody lack of talent, almost anyone who had anything to do with it.” She believed Brando’s brownface performance was evidence that the film had “an ugly racialism and arrested development, frogtorturing soft sadism at its heart.”
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