Elia Kazan | On the Waterfront / 1954

somebody

by Douglas Messerli

 

Budd Schulberg (screenplay, based, in part, by articles by Malcolm Johnson), Elia Kazan (director) On the Waterfront / 1954

 

     The same year that The Pajama Game opened on Broadway, Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront premiered in movie houses; the two could not be more different in how they deal with the subject workers and unions. Whereas in The Pajama Game the local union, completely controlled by the local workers, successfully serves their concerns, writer Budd Schulberg's reportage of the International Longshoreman's Association, run by the mob (in New York the infamous Genovese family) argues that they rob union funds while demanding complete fealty and further financial extortion from the workers.

 

    The film, based on newspapers stories written by Malcolm Johnson in the New York Sun, begins with a somewhat dim-witted but gentle tough, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), playing lackey to the gangster union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) who orders him to lure a young dockworker, Joey Doyle, to his apartment rooftop. Doyle has evidently informed on union workers to a new Crime Commission committee, and Johnny wants him killed. The unsuspecting Molloy (who presumes Friendly's henchmen will only rough him up) does what he's told, inviting Doyle, himself a bird lover, to inspect his rooftop pigeons. In shock, Terry witnesses Doyle's murder as he is hurled to the street below.

     From that moment on, Elia Kazan's film takes its subject by the teeth and refuses to let go. No matter what one thinks about Kazan—most of my older Hollywood friends have refused to speak to or even of him since 1952 when he served as a friendly witness before the House on un-American Activities—there is no question that On the Waterfront is a powerful and mesmerizing film, with brilliant performances by Brando, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger, and Eva Marie Saint and an original score by Leonard Bernstein. The film won eight Academy Awards, including the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, and is listed on the American Film Institute's list of most memorable movies.

     It is useful to realize, however, that no matter how factual Schulberg and Kazan's film was (and there is every reason to believe that they correctly portrayed the brutality of the New York shipping docks) Kazan's intention was to create a kind of allegory for his own position before McCarthy and others. The original screenplay, "The Hook," was by Arthur Miller (who refused to name names before the HUAC committee), but he was replaced by Schulberg (who, like Kazan, testified as a friendly witness before the committee). Pressure from the HUAC committee wanted the mob villains to also be Communists, but fortunately Schulberg did not defer to their wishes. Nonetheless, Kazan's film, with its emphasis on those who refuse to speak up against the mob, his obvious disdain for those who remain "Deaf and Dumb (D & D)," was clearly a statement against the criticism he had received for speaking out at HUAC. *

     Most of On the Waterfront, accordingly is devoted to the long struggle by Father Barry (Karl Malden) and Joey Doyle's sister, Edie (Eva Marie Saint), with whom Terry gradually falls in love, to convince Terry to come clean and report what he has seen to the Crime Commission. When the mob begins to suspect that Terry might squeal, they order him killed, unless Terry's older brother Charley—deeply involved in the Union mob—can convince him to remain silent. Through conversations with Edie and Father Barry, Terry gradually begins to understand the difference between survival and hope, as he develops a new set of moral values which reach back into his own past.

    In what is one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in the film, Charley literally takes his brother "on a ride," trying to force Terry to understand the danger of his potential acts. As they discuss Terry's past career as a boxer, Terry admits that is has very little offer in his current life. But whereas Charley blames his brother's manager ("That skunk we got you for a manager, he brought you along too fast"), Terry suddenly blurts out the truth:

 

                    It wasn't him, Charley! It was you. You remember that night in the Garden,

                    you came down to my dressing room and said: 'Kid, this ain't your

                    night. We're going for the price on Wilson.' You remember that? 'This

                    ain't your night!' My night! I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens?

                    He gets the title shot outdoors in the ball park—and whadda I get? A

                    one-way ticket to Palookaville.

 

Their final interchange represents Terry's transformation from dim-witted lackey to a man of growing wisdom and moral integrity:

 

                   Terry: You was my brother, Charley. You shoulda looked out of me

                        a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me—just a little—so I wouldn't

                        have to take them dives for the short-end money.

                   Charley: I had some bets down for you. You saw some money.

                   Terry (yelling and heartbroken): You don't understand! I coulda had

                        class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead

                        of a bum, which is what I am. Let's face it [pause]....It was you, Charley.

 

With such an intense scene between brothers, Kazan needs to say little about the union Charley represents. The relationship between the workers and the union is played out in On the Waterfront in terms of sibling betrayal, saving the director from having to focus on the deeper issues concerning the relationship between the two forces.

     Obviously, Terry must die! And in Schulberg's original script that was to have been his fate. But Kazan would then have been without a hero to give evidence to his righteous act of testifying. In the final film Terry battles Friendly directly through a kind of end-all fighting bout; he is nearly killed by the union henchmen, but, once Terry is helped literally to stand, his supporters in pietà-like formation, he refuses to give in, weaving and lunging forward, a working man's Christ as he moves into the maw of the ship, Friendly shouting after like some angry schoolyard bully who has temporarily lost his powers. The cinematic myth Kazan has created is perhaps more powerful than Schulberg's original political commentary.

 

 *It's interesting that Miller went on to write two works that told a different story of behavior regarding public testimony: A View from the Bridge, about the family loyalty of Italian immigrants, and The Crucible, about the Salem witchcraft trials and the related testimony of young girls and others against the so-called witches.

 

Los Angeles, October 14-17, 2009

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2009), originally printed with reviews of On the Waterfront and Norma Rae as

     “It Comes with the Job.”

Reprinted from Reading Films: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).