Date Seen: 8/3/17
Score: 5/5
DIRECTOR: Elia Kazan
PRODUCER: Sam Spiegel
STUDIO: Columbia Pictures
SCREENPLAY: Budd Schulberg
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Boris Kaufman
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| Marlon Brando |
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| Lee J. Cobb, Marlon Brando, and Rod Steiger |
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| Lee J. Cobb and Marlon Brando |
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| Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint |
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| Marlon Brando and Karl Malden |
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| Karl Malden |
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| Elia Kazan's real message |
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| Rod Steiger |
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| Lee J. Cobb |
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| "A pigeon for a pigeon" |
Elia Kazan is a complex director, whose personal scandals and ideological conflicts cannot be removed from his body of work, which contains more than one masterpiece of independent realism. Maturing as a director on the heels of the Studio System's demise, Kazan's films can be lauded for their hyperrealist portrayal of human emotion, psychological conflict, complicated relationships, and the burden of guilt, as well as for their exploration of the American values and principles that Kazan himself was obsessed with. And rightly so: I will not deny that Kazan's films are beautiful in their utilization of the Stanislavsky "method" of acting, post-noir black and white cinematography, "operatic melodrama" musical scores, and sociopolitical subtext to create gorgeous and tortured stories of human suffering and endurance. Some of Kazan's films, like A Streetcar Named Desire (1950) and East of Eden (1955), are able to express this psychological tension that Kazan explores so well, without being politically polarizing. However, Kazan's controversial masterpiece, 1954's On The Waterfront, is perhaps his most conflicting, contentious film, and it's all because of Kazan's Faustian decision to testify before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1952.
Hollywood history is full of shameful periods of politicized unfairness and prejudice, but the Blacklist was one of the most damaging, despicable policies of all. This essay will not be an overview of the Hollywood Blacklist, nor will it be getting into nitty-gritty specifics about the Cold War's effects on Hollywood policies and filmmaking politics; if you want to learn more about this era, I highly suggest listening to the Hollywood Blacklist season of the film history podcast You Must Remember This. That being said, it's absolutely necessary for me to mention how little sympathy I have for directors, actors, screenwriters, and other Hollywood figures who came before the HUAC witch hunt committee and named the names of their friends and colleagues whom they suspected of being Communists. People whose names were mentioned during testimony ended up blacklisted from work, and found themselves completely alienated from their careers and personal lives. Friendships were destroyed and alliances were forged and broken. Some of the blacklisted committed suicide, while others, like actor John Garfield, suffered premature deaths from the stress endured. As frequent collaborator Arthur Miller asked of his former best friend Kazan's decision to name names, "Who are what was now safer because this man in his human weakness had been forced to humiliate himself?" The Blacklist era is a fascinating and deplorable topic that you should definitely research if you're unfamiliar with it, but for now, let's focus on the movie.
With an understanding of the Blacklist and Elia Kazan's cooperation and participation with HUAC, it's impossible for me to watch On The Waterfront without feeling uneasy. Much like D.W. Griffith made Intolerance as a response to the controversy surrounding The Birth of a Nation, Elia Kazan responded to the critics of his HUAC testimony with On The Waterfront, a film that does all it can to justify the decision to inform. There should be no illusion that Marlon Brando's character, the long-suffering and guilty Terry Malloy, is a stand-in for Kazan himself. As Kazan bluntly put it in his autobiography, A Life (1988), "I was preparing a film about myself." This raises a serious question: Is it possible to watch On The Waterfront as its own entity, separate from the political context it arose from?
I think it's possible, but, much like watching a film like The Birds and not considering its Cold War subtext, it's not a very enriching experience. My passion as a film scholar has always been historically based: I like to consider a film in the context of its time, and think about the ways it was influenced by society and, in turn, went on to influence society. For me, On The Waterfront is a cinematic goldmine full of historical context, and it's bloodstained with Kazan's guilty conscience. So, first of all I think that if you know anything about the Blacklist it's difficult to watch On The Waterfront and not think about it. More importantly, I feel like it might actually be irresponsible to watch this film without understanding its political undertones and real-life context.
If you know absolutely nothing about HUAC and the Blacklist, it's more than likely that you could watch a film like On The Waterfront and, like many people have, hail Terry Malloy as a hero. Kazan's film, carried by a script written by fellow name-namer Budd Schulberg, does all it can to paint Malloy as a victim caught up in a dangerous organized crime syndicate. It aligns the "good guys" (Malloy, Eva Marie Saint's Edie, and Karl Malden's Father Barry) very far away from the "bad guys" (Lee J. Cobb's Johnny Friendly and his gang), so that there is very little uncertainty of whose side the viewer should identify with. Although Malloy's indecisiveness over whether or not to inform on the bad guys is the crux of the film's psychological conflict, there is no doubt that to inform on them would be the "good" thing to do, while to keep quiet would be effectively relegating Terry to an inferior position as one of the many nameless, unimportant, ineffective dock workers that form the film's silent crowds.
Throughout the film, Kazan builds essentially every kind of pressure onto Malloy as he debates whether or not to inform on his fellow union members. Firstly, there is the self-serving aspect: Terry is desperate to be somebody, a desire that has been squelched by his brother Charley (Rod Steiger), who has sacrificed Terry's chances as a successful prize fighter on behalf of his boss, Johnny Friendly. The only way for him to reclaim his own life, and in doing so find success as an individual, is to inform and break away from his group of corrupted colleagues. Kazan himself felt, foolishly, as though his inner circle of leftist film industry colleagues had been invaded by an enemy whose influence would deny him the success he thought he deserved. Perhaps Kazan was influenced to inform by his fear of being blacklisted, and therefore being taken out of work completely; perhaps he actually believed that if he removed his colleagues from the opportunity to make films, it would make more room for him to succeed in the business. It's unlikely that Kazan actually thought that his colleagues posed a threat because of their former alliance with Communism (see the Miller quote in paragraph two). Either way, Kazan channels this self-preserving instinct as one of the main motivators for Malloy to inform.
Besides this main point of motivation, Kazan pulls out all the usual naggers, including a Priest who represents the guilt of religion and what seems like a duty to God to do the "right" thing, and a Woman, who embodies the traditional idea that women are spiritually pure and above men in their ethical duties. Both Karl Malden's Father Berry and Eva Marie Saint's Edie put additional pressures on Terry to inform, convincing him that this will be the only way he can atone for his missteps and prevent others from sharing the fate of the many bumped-off men who dared to speak out.
So we can say from this analysis that Kazan, through this story of corrupt Union workers on a shoreline in New Jersey, is basically setting up a long-winded justification for his own actions. Fine. The man has the right to do this. But where it gets really complicated and, to me, shameful, is how Kazan confuses his irresponsible actions with heroics, and how he displays this through the veneer of this film. In his review of the film, Phillip Loparte quotes Sidney Lumet as saying "Informing in criminal activity is very different from informing in the political sphere." Likewise, many critics have made the point that "informing on Communists and informing on mobsters are not comparable" (Klehr and Haynes). To me, it's not that they're not comparable, it's just that they're not equal. This is where Kazan fails: in trying to align the cinematic bad guys with the historical victims, and vise versa. It's totally possible for me to look upon Terry Malloy's plight with sympathy, because he actually does do the right thing by coming forward with information on organized crime that will help authorities take down corrupted Union officers and make the Hoboken waterfront safer. Good on you, Terry! What Kazan did is nothing like this. The man, out of fear of his own downfall, came forward willingly and cooperated with one of American history's most shameful political bodies, listing off the names (and ruining the lives and careers) of a dozen of his peers. Kazan, although stubbornly deciding to never go back on his decision and apologize, was clearly wracked with guilt his entire life, and On The Waterfront does much to emphasize the kind of guilty conscience he dealt with in the aftermath of his decision. Unfortunately, Kazan, once again, decided to take the low road, making his cinematic doppelgänger a tortured victim rather than a tortured perpetrator.
This is why I think it's irresponsible to watch On The Waterfront with no political context. Because, thanks to Kazan's masterful direction and use of powerful neo-noir mise-en-scène and ultra realism, it's entirely possible to become convinced of what the director deluded himself into believing. I loved this film because of the quality I've expressed throughout this essay- Kazan's ability to blend method acting with direction influenced by Italian neorealism, as well as film noir cinematography that taps into the human psyche. There are scenes in this film that I adore, like the one in which Malloy comes clean to Edie about his part in her brother's murder. Every performance is a gem, especially Brando's vulnerable, heartfelt, repressed ode to human suffering as Malloy. It just pains me to think that, for his portrayal as Kazan's double, he was complicit in the skewed retelling of Kazan's testimony, and that he was rewarded by the corrupted film industry with an Academy Award. This irony, as well as the irony of Kazan as a master realist director whose film completely distorts historical reality, is not lost.
Clearly I have mixed feelings about On The Waterfront. I hope that we can come to appreciate this film in the way that we appreciate other controversial-yet-great American movies, from Gone With The Wind to The Birth of a Nation: with a grain of salt about the ways in which it manipulates the viewer to understand a skewed historical reality that the director probably believed. Alas, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Last Tycoon, which would become Kazan's last film, "What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story."
Sources
"Elia Kazan: A Retrospective," by Lloyd Michaels, published in Film Criticism, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Fall, 1985)
"On The Waterfront without a Clue: A Review Essay" by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, published in Film History, Vol. 16, No. 4, Politics and Film (2004)
"Review: On The Waterfront" by Joanna Rapf, published in Cinéaste, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Summer, 2013)
"Review: On The Waterfront" by Phillip Lopate, published in Cinéaste, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Spring, 2002)
"Elia Kazan's America" by Estelle Changas, published in Film Comment, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Summer, 1972)
"Elia Kazan: Caught Between HUAC and the 'New Hollywood'," from the book Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover, by Denise Mann (2008)
"On The Waterfront" from Wikipedia
"The Blacklist" season of Karina Longworth's podcast You Must Remember This
All photos from Google Images, and all GIFs from Google Images and GIPHY.
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