Monthly Archives: February 2020

  • On the Waterfront

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Elia Kazan (1954)

    In consecutive years of the 1950s, a commercial and critical hit also ended up winning eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and two acting Oscars.  What’s more, the films in question fully deserved their success.  Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity and Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront both tell gripping stories.  They include plenty of action without this dominating at the expense of character.  (They do what screen drama is essentially designed to do:  they reveal and develop character through action.)  From Here to Eternity’s script is the more remarkable in that Daniel Taradash distilled James Jones’s mammoth novel (nearer 900 than 800 pages) into a film of just under two hours.  Budd Schulberg’s original screenplay for On the Waterfront is less expansive but the resulting movie shares with From Here to Eternity an epic quality that doesn’t derive from great length – Kazan’s film runs only 108 minutes – or narrative scope.  These feel like big pictures because they deal convincingly with subjects and people that matter.

    New Jersey dockworker Terry Malloy was once a promising boxer.  Terry’s career in the ring ended thanks to Michael J Skelly, aka ‘Johnny Friendly’, the Mob-connected boss of the longshoremen’s union.  He owned a sizeable piece of Terry the prizefighter and ordered him to lose a crucial match so that Friendly could win a bet.  The order to throw the fight came via  Charley ‘the Gent’ Malloy, Friendly’s right-hand man and Terry’s elder brother.   It’s common knowledge that Friendly is behind much worse offences, including several killings.  Attempts by the Port of New York and New Jersey Crime Commission to bring him and his associates to justice are thwarted by the muting fear of dockworkers whose livelihoods effectively depend on tyrannical Friendly’s say-so.  A young docker called Joey Doyle is an exception to the rule.  He’s prepared to testify to the Crime Commission against Johnny Friendly.

    That’s the backstory to On the Waterfront.  The narrative proper begins with Terry (Marlon Brando) talking neighbour Joey (Ben Wagner) into going up on the roof of the Hoboken tenement building where he lives.  Moments later, Joey falls from the roof, sustaining fatal injuries.  Terry knew Friendly’s men were going to lean on Joey.  He didn’t realise they were going to push him to his death.  His father (John F Hamilton) calls a priest; as Father Barry (Karl Malden) prays beside the young man’s body, Joey’s sister Edie (Eva Marie Saint) furiously rejects the priest’s assurance that ‘time and faith are great healers’.  She wants to know who killed her brother.  With Edie in tow, Barry, the ‘waterfront priest’, convenes a meeting of dockworkers in his church and asks them, ‘How can we call ourselves Christians and protect these murderers with our silence?’

    Terry is sent by Charley (Rod Steiger) to attend and report back on the church meeting.  In the event, Friendly’s men break up the gathering.   Terry helps Edie escape the violence and is immediately taken with her (she soon reciprocates).  His feelings for Edie and Father Barry’s words germinate Terry’s increasing crisis of conscience, which is the heart of the story.  Subpoenaed to testify to the Waterfront Crime Commission, he intends at first to remain silent.  He eventually decides to change his mind and risk his life.  For telling the truth, he loses his job and suffers serious physical injury but Terry emerges victorious from the film’s truly climactic final scene, a showdown on the docks with Friendly (Lee J Cobb).

    His portrait of Terry Malloy illustrates not only Marlon Brando’s greatness as an actor but also his seminal importance as an influence on film acting.  He is thoroughly physically convincing:  Terry is a young, strong man who still uses his brawn to earn a living but isn’t in the kind of shape he was in his boxing days.  Brando is intellectually right too.  The hero struggles to work out mentally what he should do; more often than not, he has to feel things out.  Brando is affecting in the famous ‘I could have been a contender’ dialogue between the Malloy brothers.  He’s best of all in Terry’s scenes with Edie, first beside a couple of children’s swings in a scrubby park, then in a bar.  Both those sequences are extended, especially the one in the bar.  Kazan’s readiness to let a conversational exchange between characters continue for some time in the same place, rooted in confidence that limited physical movement doesn’t make a scene emotionally static, is an important part of his influence on American films.

    So too is his direction of actors.  Although the styles of the supporting players are various, Kazan orchestrates them.  In the one significant female role (and her cinema debut), Eva Marie Saint is eager but authentically passionate.  Her physicality is very expressive:  Saint’s Edie is willowy but wiry too.   The character is a trainee teacher with brains that Terry lacks but the mutual attraction between them is wholly believable.  As Charley, described as ‘a butcher in a camel coat’, Rod Steiger anticipates the quietly brutal professionalism of the likes of Robert Duvall’s Tom Hagen in The Godfather nearly twenty years later.  Steiger’s persistent greyness in the early stages makes Charley’s later outbursts of verbal violence all the more startling.  Kazan cast a fine assortment of shapes, sizes and faces in the smaller docker and/or hood parts – this also seems to foretell the precise, imaginative casting of The Godfather films.   (Francis Ford Coppola has spoken of his admiration for and debt to Kazan.)  Martin Balsam, also making his big-screen debut after several years of TV work, registers in his uncredited appearance as one of the Crime Commission men.

    It’s Kazan’s success in blending the performances of Lee J Cobb and Karl Malden into a satisfying whole that’s the most impressive aspect of his direction.  Cobb and Malden had both worked with Kazan in the New York Group Theatre in the 1930s and in one or more of his earlier films but their acting seems more traditional than that of others in On the Waterfront.  It’s true the roles of Friendly and Barry are relatively bluntly conceived.  This may largely explain why Malden, a reliably good actor, comes across as a bit of a cliché as the tough-talking man of God.  Although my experience of Lee J Cobb is that he needed little encouragement to overdo things, Friendly too isn’t the greatest part.  He’s written as a familiar villain – right through to the end when, his evil spell broken by Terry’s courage, he vows snarling revenge.  Yet neither performance seems incongruous, so cogently does Kazan harmonise the playing.

    That musical verb is apt in pointing to another element that helps Kazan achieve this balance.  Leonard Bernstein’s score, his only original film composition, is powerful.  It sometimes seems too powerful, to be competing with what you’re already getting from the actors and the story.  Yet the strong-arming music (like Cobb’s excessive acting) serves also to define On the Waterfront as a tragic melodrama.   This isn’t to disparage the film.  Kazan somehow persuades you that if it were less melodramatic, it wouldn’t be so potently tragic.

    Terry and Joey Doyle both keep and race pigeons   At the start, Terry lures Joey by telling him he’s found one of Joey’s prized birds, which went missing after the most recent race.  A real pigeon is thus used as a decoy bird.  Terry eventually becomes a stool pigeon.  Kazan and Budd Schulberg have Tommy (Thomas Handley) – the kid who admires Terry, helps look after his rooftop pigeon loft but kills the birds when Terry testifies against Friendly – justify himself with the tearful accusation, ‘A pigeon for a pigeon!’  In other words, this avian metaphor is seriously overworked but it doesn’t feel that way:  the scenes between Brando and Thomas Handley[1] are so naturally and affectingly done.   The film was shot mostly in and around Hoboken, and in black-and-white.  Kazan, his cinematographer Boris Kaufman and art director Richard Day give the locations, indoors and out, a singular reality – unspectacular yet vivid.

    On the Waterfront started life as ‘Crime on the Waterfront’ a series of newspaper articles in late 1948, which won for their author Malcolm Johnson a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.  The first version of the screenplay was written by Arthur Miller in 1951, when he and Kazan were still on good terms.  The following year, Kazan, after initially refusing to give evidence to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, named eight former Group Theatre members who had been Communists.  His testimony, enough to ensure that Kazan remained a controversial figure for the rest of his long life (he died in 2003 at the age of ninety-four), ended his friendship with Miller.   When Budd Schulberg took the script over, he conducted interviews with, among others, the whistleblower longshoreman Johnny De Vincenzo and Father John M Corridan, the real-life inspirations for Terry Malloy and Father Barry respectively.

    Schulberg had also appeared before HUAC to give ‘friendly testimony’ (the adjective makes the nickname of Lee J Cobb’s character all the more striking).  Just as Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, two years previously, resonates with the screenwriter Carl Foreman’s isolation in the light of refusing to name names to HUAC, so On the Waterfront is widely seen as Schulberg’s and Kazan’s response to criticism for taking the opposite position.  Whether this gave extra passion and focus to Kazan’s work is hard to say but On the Waterfront shows him and Marlon Brando at their very best.

    15 February 2020

    [1] Handley’s IMDb biography makes fascinating reading: ‘Thomas Handley’s father, a longshoreman, was blackballed for opposing corrupt union leaders. He disappeared when Handley was 4 months old, and may have been murdered by the gang that controlled the New York docks. … Handley was initially hired to feed the pigeons on the set of  On the Waterfront … but Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg had him audition for the movie. … He went on to become a longshoreman himself, and in 2002 was elected recording secretary of his union after the leadership was ousted for corruption.’

  • Casablanca

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Curtiz (1942)

    Of course I’d seen clips but I don’t remember having watched the whole thing before.  By the end of the widely, dearly beloved Casablanca, it had been a bit like listening to an unfamiliar Shakespeare play, thanks to the famous phrases I didn’t realise the film coined.  I knew ‘Here’s looking at you, kid’ started life here and that ‘Play it again, Sam’ misquotes what Ingrid Bergman actually says to Dooley Wilson (‘Play it, Sam.  Play “As Time Goes By”’).  I didn’t know or had forgotten that ‘We’ll always have Paris’, ‘Round up the usual suspects’ and ‘… this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship’ all originated in the Casablanca screenplay (all, as it happens, within the film’s last few minutes).

    What’s come to be seen as the timeless epitome of Hollywood romantic drama is a film of a very specific date, as the scene-setting words and newsreel narrator tones of the opening voiceover make explicitly clear[1].  Casablanca was shot a few months after the US entered World War II:  the protagonist Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) – owner of ‘Rick’s Café Américain’, where the action mostly takes place – personifies American isolationism yielding eventually to self-sacrificing involvement.  Holed up in his nightclub-cum-gambling-den, Rick drinks alone and professes no interest in politics but it soon emerges that he ran guns to Ethiopia during the recent conflict with Italy, and fought for the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War.  Rick’s jaded cynicism is really the legacy of a love affair – in Paris, not long after the outbreak of war across Europe – with a woman called Ilsa Lund.  She unexpectedly deserted him, just as they were preparing to leave the city.  Ilsa’s astonishing reappearance in Casablanca, at Rick’s club (‘Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine’), instantly stirs up his buried passion.  This isn’t difficult to accept:  Ilsa is played by Ingrid Bergman, who similarly ignites Casablanca from the moment she appears on the screen.

    Not that the film has been sluggish up to this point.  The solemn, urgent voiceover at the start compels attention.  From that point on, Michael Curtiz never lets the pace slacken, creating some local colour in the Casablanca souk before moving inside Rick’s club and building momentum there.  The screenplay, by Julius J Epstein, Philip G Epstein and Howard Koch, is adapted from an unproduced stage play, Everyone Comes to Rick’s, by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison.  (I suppose it’s conceivable they thought up one or more of the immortal lines quoted above.)   The narrative unfolds largely within the club yet the film isn’t remotely static – and not just because there’s plenty of physical action at Rick’s place.  Casablanca stands as a good example of confidence in originally theatrical material to deliver excitement through the essential themes and circumstances that it dramatises, even when that happens on a single set.  The club, with its international personnel and clientele, functions as, among other things, an analogue of the claustrophobic predicament of those anxious to get out of ‘imprisoned Europe … toward the freedom of the Americas’ but who ‘wait and wait … and wait’.

    Ilsa turns up at Rick’s with her husband Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a Czech Resistance leader and renowned fugitive.  In order to escape to America and continue his work at a safe distance, Laszlo requires ‘letters of transit’, which have accidentally come into Rick’s possession.  It’s as she’s trying to obtain these letters from him that Ilsa explains to Rick that, when they met and fell in love in Paris, she wrongly believed her husband had been killed attempting to escape a concentration camp.  Ilsa also admits she still loves Rick.  He agrees to help her with the letters of transit: who will eventually use these to secure passage to Lisbon and across the Atlantic is a matter of continuing suspense.  First, Rick allows Ilsa to believe they’ll stay together once her husband has left with the letters.  Then Laszlo, realising that his wife and Rick are in love, urges the latter to take Ilsa to America.  At the foggy airport where the film’s final scene takes place, Rick’s climactic act of self-denial for the greater good is to make Ilsa board a Lisbon-bound plane along with her husband.  Rick stays behind and watches them fly off to safety.  (It has to be said the plane looks, to modern eyes, a distinctly unsafe conveyance.)

    In the early stages, it’s hard to see Rick free of Humphrey Bogart’s later roles as a world-weary but essentially honourable hero.  As the film goes on, Bogart breaks out of this palimpsest and Rick becomes more strongly individual.  Many people like Bogart, the actor and his persona, for their supposed absence of sentimentality (even though that quality is sometimes romanticised in his films).  I tend to find him too samey for my taste but there’s no denying his lack of conventional glamour and odd gait give Bogart a highly distinctive reality on screen, very much in evidence in Casablanca.  The flashbacks to Rick and Ilsa’s time together in Paris are remarkable for how often Bogart smiles in them.  The smiles are modest but, because they’re a rare commodity in a Bogart performance, powerful.  How did 1940s cameramen light stars’ eyes in black-and-white pictures to shine the way that Bogart’s and, especially, Ingrid Bergman’s shine here?  Although the effect is strongest when Ilsa’s eyes fill up with tears, the cinematographer Arthur Edeson makes them lucent almost throughout. The greater variety of characters Bergman played in the course of her career ensures that she never seems, as Bogart does initially, to be doing her usual thing.  Her ardency and emotional mobility are very appealing.

    In the supporting cast, Claude Rains is the standout as the breezily corrupt police chief Renault.  At first, Rains is almost too entertaining (a couple of times, he anticipates a feed line, so keen is he to deliver Renault’s witty rejoinder) but his acting becomes a vital means of deflating the melodramatic twists and turns of the story.  A Bulgarian refugee (Joy Page) and her roulette-playing husband (Helmut Dantine) are enabled to get out of Casablanca.  Renault instructs them to come to his office next morning to finalise arrangements.  Grateful and eager, they assure him they’ll be there at six o’clock.  Renault replies affably, ‘I’ll be there at ten’.  Rains never cutifies Renault’s candid lack of principle but it’s impossible not to enjoy the actor’s aplomb.  In a different way, Paul Henreid’s lack of charisma serves a not dissimilar purpose in making Victor Laszlo more believable.  That, however, may have not have been what Henreid intended.  Although he shares top billing with Bogart and Bergman, he’s outshone not just by them and Rains but also by Conrad Veidt as Strasser, the senior Nazi officer sent to Casablanca to capture Laszlo.

    Casablanca reunites Bogart with two of his co-stars from the previous year’s The Maltese Falcon, both playing members of the local underworld.  As Ugarte, whose business is selling the letters of transit that drive the plot, Peter Lorre disappears from the film all too soon.  As Signor Ferrari, a black marketeer who’s also a rival bar owner, Sydney Greenstreet is a very peculiar world citizen – a fez-wearing Italian whose accent is sui generis.  The more broadly-accented actors in smaller roles, notably the mittel-European waiter Carl (S Z Sakall) and the Russian barman Sascha (Leonid Kinskey), are a lot more amusing than might be expected.  Knowing the real-life circumstances of some of the cast gives their presence an edge:  of those mentioned above, Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt, S Z Sakall and Helmut Dantine had all fled Nazi Germany.

    The soundtrack includes, as well as its most famous component, a Max Steiner score and other popular songs performed by Dooley Wilson’s Sam (Rick’s loyal pal as well as house pianist).  When a group of Nazi officers, led by Strasser, break into ‘The Watch on the Rhine’, Laszlo wants the club’s band to play the Marseillaise instead.  Rick gives the go ahead: the enthusiastic community singing of the French anthem drowns out the German one.  ‘As Time Goes By’ features three times.  When Sam first accedes to Ilsa’s famous request, Rick angrily intervenes: ‘Sam, I thought I told you never to play –‘.  (He then catches sight of Ilsa for the first time – since Paris.)  The second time, the song passes off relatively without incident.  The third time, things have got so tense between the principals that the exasperated look on Ingrid Bergman’s face says, ‘Give it a rest, Sam’.

    14 February 2020

    [1] ‘With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas.  Lisbon became the great embarkation point.  But not everybody could get to Lisbon directly.  And so a torturous, roundabout refugee trail sprang up.  Paris to Marseilles, across the Mediterranean to Oran.  Then, by train or auto or foot, across the rim of Africa to Casablanca in French Morocco.  Here, the fortunate ones, through money or influence or luck, might obtain exit visas and scurry to Lisbon.  And from Lisbon to the New World.  But the others wait in Casablanca.  And wait and wait…and wait.’

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