FILM · 1976 · USA
The Missouri Breaks
27 archived facts 5 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
All facts (27)
- #001
Jack Nicholson disliked that Marlon Brando used cue cards during filming. In their scenes together, whenever Brando turned his gaze to a cue card behind the cameraman, Nicholson's concentration was broken.
- #002
Marlon Brando's performance in the film was largely improvised. Director Arthur Penn eventually gave up on him and decided to let him do as he pleased.
- #003
In an interview published in TIME magazine on May 24, 1976, Marlon Brando was reported to have "changed the whole atmosphere of the bounty hunter character Robert E. Lee Clayton by inventing a deadly hand weapon resembling both a harpoon and a club that he used to kill." Brando said, "I've always wondered why nobody in the history of deadly weapons ever invented this particular weapon. It appealed to me because I used to be very expert at knife throwing."
- #004
Despite receiving the highest fee, Marlon Brando does not first appear on screen until thirty-six minutes into the film.
- #005
The original publicity reported that Marlon Brando improvised so much on set that a private stenographer had to be brought in from California to record Brando's personal poetry and spontaneous dialogue.
- #006
Thomas McGuane was unhappy with how the film turned out, believing that his screenplay was used merely as a basis for improvisation and with how it was received by both critics and the public.
- #007
Co-stars Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando were neighbors, living on Mulholland Drive in Hollywood, California. They had never worked together before this film.
- #008
Marlon Brando agreed to a million dollars for five weeks of work plus 11.3 percent of gross receipts over ten million dollars. Jack Nicholson agreed to one and a half million dollars for ten weeks of work plus ten percent of gross receipts over twelve and a half million dollars.
- #009
So that he would not have to memorize his lines, Brando, as had been his habit for some time, placed cue cards all over the sets, including among the cabbages in a scene with Nicholson and on the wall behind John McLiam.
- #010
Because contract negotiations with Marlon Brando were not completed on the first day of principal photography, Brando refused to work. On the first day of shooting, the cast and crew played football.
- #011
Writer and script doctor Robert Towne devised the film's final showdown, which resolved the story problems caused by Marlon Brando's improvisation and his changes to the script.
- #012
Hunter von Leer, who played a gang member hanged at the beginning, was in real life a farm owner and became very successful at it.
- #013
Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton were initially considered for the roles played by Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando in this film.
- #014
Years later, Marlon Brando admitted that the finished film was not very good but that he had enjoyed working with Jack Nicholson.
- #015
Martin Scorsese considered directing this film.
- #016
The weapon carried by Robert E. Lee Clayton is a Sharps Creedmoor rifle. In the 1870s, Sharps made a few models specifically for the NRA competition at the Creedmoor rifle range on Long Island, New York, which is why the guns were called "Creedmoor." These were long-range accuracy competitions, and NRA rules for Creedmoor matches required that rifles weigh no more than ten pounds and have a single trigger. Generally, a heavier barrel means better recoil control and therefore better accuracy.
- #017
An article in the April 21, 1976 issue of Variety announced that United Artists would distribute 900 prints for the opening of the film, UA's biggest opening up to that time.
- #018
Tom is considering buying a farm the size of "four sections." According to the United States Public Land Survey System, one section equals one square mile (2.6 square kilometers) or 640 acres (260 hectares).
- #019
The train robbed in the film is pulled by Engine 483, a narrow-gauge steam locomotive built by Baldwin in 1925. The train is now owned by the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad and is stored out of service in Chama, New Mexico.
- #020
Thomas McGuane wrote the screenplay with the intention of directing the film himself.
- #021
After this film, Marlon Brando and Frederic Forrest worked together again on Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979).
- #022
The Missouri Breaks was Kathleen Lloyd's first film.
- #023
It was Brando's third and final Western, after One-Eyed Jacks (1961) and The Appaloosa (1966).
- #024
Jack Nicholson and Luana Anders appeared in Easy Rider (1969), The Last Detail (1973), Goin' South (1978) and The Two Jakes (1990); Anders also appeared in The Trip (1967), which Nicholson wrote.
- #025
It was the second film to feature both Jack Nicholson and Randy Quaid after The Last Detail (1973), and also the second in which they go to a whorehouse and Quaid encounters a girl half his size.
- #026
The film's cast includes two Oscar winners, Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, and two Oscar nominees, Randy Quaid and Frederic Forrest.
- #027
Kathleen Lloyd, Frederic Forrest and John P. Ryan all appeared in It Lives Again (1978). Ryan also appeared in It's Alive (1974).
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