Brando Predicts Quiet Summer

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31680, 16 May 1968, Page 13

Brando Predicts Quiet Summer

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright) LONDON, May 15. The American actor, Marlon Brando, will play the part of a white villain in a film about an eighteenth-century Negro revolt in the Caribbean, as part of his campaign to further the civil rights cause.

The Academy Award-win-ning actor, who has temporarily given up his film career

to devote himself to improving white-black relations in the United States, said work on the film would start in the autumn.

In London for one day’s work on a television feature about race relations in America, Marlon Brando said it was not too late to solve the race problem if white and black began talking to each other. “It will be a quiet summer—one tempered by communication,” he predicted. The so-called black extremists he had spoken to were not filled with hate for the whites, even for the white Liberals.

“It isn’t a question of race against race, but group against group,” he said. The actor called on Americans to give 1 per cent of their salaries to civil rights causes in a bid to “buy time” to prevent a race catastrophe, and added that he himself was giving 12 per cent of his income to this end.