Martin Ritt (1957)

It certainly deserves its place in the BFI ‘Birth of the Method:  The Revolution in American Acting’ season.   The source material is a 1955 television drama, A Man is Ten Feet Tall, by Robert Alan Aurthur, who also wrote the screenplay for this, Martin Ritt’s first feature film[1].   Edge of the City is the story of the friendship between Axel Nordmann, a young white man from Indiana, and Tommy Tyler, an African-American who works as a longshoreman on the New York docks, where Axel gets a job.  The interracial relationship made the film, at the time of its release, not just controversial but, in Southern states, simply unacceptable.  It was refused by many movie theatres and, thanks to its limited release, a commercial failure.  A main strength of Aurthur’s script is that the colour of Tommy’s skin is both crucial and unimportant.  He is eventually killed, after coming to Axel’s aid, by another stevedore, Charlie Malik, who’s both a vicious bully and a virulent racist.  But when Axel and Tommy are drinking in a bar together or having a meal at Tommy’s home, with his wife Lucy (who’s black) and her friend Ellen (who’s white), none of the characters suggests any racial self-consciousness, let alone comments on the ‘mixed’ gathering.

In other respects, the screenplay is less distinguished.  Edge of the City is at heart a socially conscious melodrama with tragic and inspiring elements.  In one of their first conversations at the docks, Tommy tells Axel that, when he stands out from the pack and does the brave, right thing, ‘a man is ten feet tall’.  Tommy dies; Axel, along with the other longshoremen (whites and blacks), stays silent when Charlie Malik tells the police that Tommy accidentally fell on the baling hook with which Malik fatally stabbed him.  After a meeting with Lucy, in which she learns from Axel that her husband’s death was not accidental and angrily accuses him of not being a real friend to Tommy, Axel summons the courage to fight Malik.  The closing shot of the film shows Axel dragging the unconscious Malik towards the camera – and, one assumes, towards justice.  One assumes also that, in revealing how Tommy was killed, Axel will also be exposed as the army deserter that he is, and will go to jail.  But he will have attained the stature of which Tommy spoke.

The moral scheme is familiar – the work setting and the central character’s dilemma about whether to tell the truth are obviously indebted to On the Waterfront – but the direction and acting make the material feel fresh.  You get this from the very first scene, when John Cassavetes’ Axel is looking for work.  This is a short exchange between him and the man (Ralph Bell) on night duty at the docks office but Martin Ritt and his actors get a great deal going between the few lines of dialogue – an atmosphere of wariness, furtiveness and anxiety is swiftly and economically created.  Both the docks and the streets of New York City, photographed by Joseph Brun, have a vivid immediacy throughout.  Perhaps the best scenes of all are the social episodes involving Axel, Tommy, Lucy and Ellen.  Although shadowed by the secret that Axel is keeping (or, once he’s revealed to Tommy that he deserted, by Axel’s fear of being found out by others), these sequences have a reality and vitality largely unencumbered by plot.

Sidney Poitier is the only one of the cast who had appeared in the teleplay version of the story but there’s nothing preconceived about his performance.  Impressive in Blackboard Jungle, Poitier is truly exciting in Edge of the City.  His acting is fluid and his physical relaxedness and dynamism are remarkable.  Tommy Tyler is caring, witty, shrewd and cocky:  he’s a good man but nothing like the saintly stiff Poitier had become on screen by the late 1960s.  He’s intensely alive – which makes Tommy’s death all the more shocking.  John Cassavetes is overshadowed by Poitier but his physically static, closed-in quality is exactly right for Axel:  his interactions with Jack Warden’s Malik, when the pair first meet, are particularly expressive.  This is the first time that I’ve understood why Ruby Dee is such an admired actress:  as Lucy, she’s especially good playing the lighter moments – she and Poitier have an effortless emotional intimacy.  Dee, in her big scene (when Lucy finds out the truth about Tommy’s death), is a shade too aware that it’s her big scene but she’s undoubtedly powerful in it.  The cast also includes Kathleen Maguire as Ellen, Estelle Hemsley as Lucy’s mother, and Ruth White and Robert Simon as Axel’s parents, to whom their son makes two faltering, tortured, long-distance phone calls, early and late on in the film.  The score by Leonard Rosenman is one of the worst elements of Edge of the City:  you know what you’re in for from the opening titles – the jangling, discordant city-on-heat music that was such a familiar accompaniment to New York-set movies of the 1950s and beyond.  Martin Ritt sensibly rations the Rosenman for some time after that but it barges back in for the climax.

20 November 2014

[1] A Man is Ten Feet Tall is an alternative title for the cinema film too – and the one used on the print shown by BFI.  It seems from IMDB, Wikipedia and Pauline Kael’s note, however, that the ‘official’ title is Edge of the City.