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.’
