The Freshman (Tri-Star Pictures, 1990)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, April 10) my husband Charles and I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies that was being shown as part of an evening-long tribute to Marlon Brando: The Freshman, a 1990 comedy written and directed by Andrew Bergman (best known for being one of the co-writers on Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles and for directing Honeymoon in Vegas, Striptease and the bizarre Jacqueline Susann biopic Isn’t She Great?) and starring Marlon Brando in an obvious parody of his Academy Award-winning role as Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather. According to the Wikipedia page on the film, Bergman was inspired by “reading a newspaper article about mobster Vincent Teresa being arrested for smuggling a near-extinct lizard into the United States.” He wanted Matthew Broderick for the key character of Clark Kellogg, an aspiring film student who comes from Vermont to attend New York University Film School, but Broderick was noncommittal until Bergman signed Brando – whereupon Broderick eagerly tweaked his schedule around so he could work with the Great Man. According to an item on the imdb.com “Trivia” page for the film, a few weeks after Bergman sent Brando the script, Brando called him and invited him to Brando’s Mulholland Drive home for “two days of intensive, non-stop conversations. The director and the actor discussed eastern religion, the economy, politics, philosophy, insects, geology, history, favorite foods, meditation – everything but the movie, the screenplay, or the role.” Finally Brando told Bergman he couldn’t possibly play the film’s central character, mob boss Carmine “Jimmy the Toucan” Sabatini, unless it could be linked in some way to The Godfather. Bergman suggested he insert a line in his screenplay claiming that Carmine Sabatini was the real-life inspiration for Don Vito Corleone, and Brando loved the idea and agreed to make the film for $3 million up-front. Once he had Brando on board, Bergman had no problem getting the rest of the cast he wanted; Laurence Olivier asked if he could play the role of a crazy chef, but Bergman decided Olivier was too old and ill and got Maximilian Schell for the part instead.

The Freshman starts with a crazy scene in the wilds of Vermont in which Clark Kellogg is out hunting with his stepfather, Dwight Armstrong (Kenneth Welch) – his real dad died when Clark was six – only Armstrong isn’t interested in killing any animals. Quite the contrary: he’s an animal-rights activist who’s out in the woods to shoot in the general direction of normal hunters to scare them away. Armstrong gives his stepson $600 in expense money for his New York trip and makes it clear that’s the last money Clark will ever get from him. At the New York airport Clark is accosted by Victor Ray (Bruno Kirby), who warns him not to trust strangers and then proceeds to talk the young naïf into letting him take him to the school and drives off with Clark’s suitcase and all his money and clothes. Clark meets with his film professor, Arthur Fleeber (Paul Benedict), who tells Clark he has to buy all the professor’s books to take his course (a scam I remember from my own days in college as well). During a meeting with the professor, Clark sees Victor outside the office window and excuses himself to give chase. It turns out Victor blew all Clark’s money on a horse-racing bet but agrees to give him back most of his clothes. Victor tells Clark he’s part of the organization for “importer” Carmine Sabatini, and offers Carmine a job as a go-fer driver for the man – who Clark never suspects is a mobster even though Brando is not only playing him, he’s playing him the same way he played Vito in The Godfather, complete with mumbled dialogue that often is hard to understand. As his first assignment for Carmine, Clark is told to go to the airport and pick up a piece of cargo for which he’s promised $500. He’s not told what the cargo is, and it turns out to be a living Komodo dragon, which for some reason has been shipped from Indonesia not in some sort of cage or enclosure but out on its own in the open. Clark has inveigled his film-school roommate, Steve Bushak (Frank Whaley), to come along and help him bring back the whatever-it-is and take it to the address they’ve been given, which is the home of chef Larry London (Maximilian Schell) and his assistant Edward (B. D. Wong, young and very hot-looking).

It turns out that Carmine runs a gourmet club that specializes in serving elaborate banquets featuring endangered species as the main course. The meals go for a minimum of $200,000 per plate – $1 million if the dish is a one-of-a-kind animal and is the last of its kind to walk or slither the earth – and we’re told there are only seven Komodo dragons left in the world and the price for eating one will be $350,000. (They’re actually scarce but not that endangered: according to imdb.com there are about 3,000 left in the wild.) On the way to Larry’s place Clark and Steve lose the big lizard in the middle of a shopping mall for a particularly funny slapstick sequence. After Clark completes the assignment he calls his mom Liz (Pamela Payton-Wright) to tell her about his new job, only his stepdad listens in on the call and phones the national Department of Fish and Wildlife to report Clark to the authorities. The authorities duly arrive in the persons of agents Chuck Greenwald (Jon Polito) and Lloyd Simpson (Richard Gant), and they stake out Clark and take surveillance photos of him. Only Greenwald and Simpson are corrupt: they’re really in the pay of another Mafioso, Bonelli, and are out to knock off both Carmine and Clark and make it look like they killed them in the line of duty. At the big banquet where the Komodo dragon is supposed to be served, a really tacky band shows up to play for the guests and Bert Parks, playing himself, sings a bad parody of his “Miss America” song (written by Don and David Was) in honor of the beast that’s about to be sacrificed for their dinner. He also does an unlikely cover of Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm,” and the band plays the 1962 Champs hit “Tequila.” The animal agents show up and raid the dinner, and there’s a struggle between Carmine and Clark in which Carmine is fatally wounded – only it turns out the whole thing is a ploy. Carmine has been working with the FBI all the time, and after Greenwald and Simpson abscond with the money for the dinner and try to flee, FBI agents come upon them and arrest them.

Carmine blesses Clark’s interest in his daughter Tina (Penelope Ann Miller), who was assigned to romance him as part of dad’s plot but actually fell in love with him. Carmine agrees to endow a new wing of the Bronx Zoo to house all the endangered animals – who as a long-running scam on Carmine’s part weren’t actually served as entrées; chef Larry London concocted a mix of Hawai’ian tiger fish and smoked turkey and palmed it off on the sickos who actually wanted to eat endangered species. Carmine also offers to help Clark jump-start his film career by using his contacts in Hollywood (one wonders which producer’s horse he’ll sacrifice to this end), but Clark begs off. The Freshman isn’t a great movie, and it’s hardly at the level of the only other film I can think of called The Freshman, the 1925 silent classic comedy by Harold Lloyd, but it’s a quite entertaining and good-spirited one. One thing I liked about the 1990 The Freshman is the sheer number of in-jokes it contains, from the poster for the play M. Butterfly Clark sees in the New York airport lobby (this was the star-making vehicle for B. D. Wong) to the fake passport Carmine makes for Clark in case he needs to flee the country and go to Palermo. The name on the passport is “Rodolfo Lasparri,” Walter Woolf King’s character as the bad tenor in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. Though I’m by no means a Brando fan (when The Godfather came out I reviewed it for my college paper and expressed my wish that Edward G. Robinson could have played the role), of the four major male Method actors who became movie stars – the others being John Garfield, Montgomery Clift and James Dean – Brando was the only one who didn’t die young and therefore we got to see him old. Brando did make some quirky and interesting movies in his (relative) dotage, including this one, Don Juan DeMarco (with Johnny Depp) and the third version of The Island of Dr. Moreau. But his pettiness and greed were amply illustrated when The Freshman went a week over schedule and Brando demanded an extra $1 million. When the producers refused, Brando started giving interviews denouncing the film and saying people shouldn’t bother to see it. Then the producers came up with the $1 million more – and Brando’s public attitude towards the film changed 180 degrees. Now all of a sudden he was telling reporters it was a great movie and he was proud of it!