On the Waterfront

As I make my way through the Oscar Best Picture winners, I have seen some films for the first time, but some I have seen many times, and that includes On the Waterfront which, for my money, is the best film of the 1950s and features the best performance by an actor I've ever seen.

Directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg, On the Waterfront is an almost perfect film. Based on a series of articles in the New York Sun about corruption in the longshoreman's union, the film was shot on location on the wharfs and rooftops of Hoboken, New Jersey, and you can practically taste and smell the coming winter in the coarse black and white photography.

Marlon Brando is Terry Malloy, a former prizefighter who is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. He is used as a hired goon by Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), head of the local and as corrupt as the day is long. Brando's older brother Charlie (Rod Steiger) is another union official, and Brando is allowed some perks and privileges because of this. In the film's opening scene, he unwittingly sets up a friend for murder because that friend was set to testify before the crime commission. As he gets to know that murdered friend's sister, Eva Marie Saint, and listens to the crusading parish priest, Karl Malden, Brando has a crisis of conscience and works to redeem himself.

This is really the first film to feature the modern-style of acting to win Best Picture. Kazan was one of the founders of the Actor's Studio, which espoused the "method" by Stanislavski. Brando was already a star (his nomination for On the Waterfront was his fourth straight), but the popularity of the film ensured that the "torn t-shirt" style of acting was now going to dominate American cinema. The epitome of this was the taxi scene, in which Steiger tries to convince his brother not to rat on the union. Brando, in turn, reveals long-held resentments, including the fact that his brother asked him to take a dive in a fight that could have made him a contender. It's one of the most famous scenes in American movie history, and rightly so, because it's a marvel of acting for both men. Brando gets a lot of the credit, particularly for the pathos and the way he tells Steiger that his older brother should have looked out for him, "just a little bit." But this time I focused on Steiger. When he pulls a gun on his brother and Brando looks at him not in anger but in sorrow, Steiger realizes he can't shoot him and leans back, knowing he's doomed. It's a powerful scene on many levels.

Then there's the ending, which even after many viewings still packs a wallop. It features one of the more savage fistfights in film history, as Brando takes on Cobb, and let's loose one my favorite lines, when Brando calls him "a cheap, dirty, lousy, stinking mug!" And then, when a bloodied Brando staggers into the warehouse, to Leonard Bernstein's score, which manages to be both mournful and hopeful, well, who wouldn't be moved by it?

There's interesting political subtext. The film essentially makes a hero out of someone who "names names," which of course Kazan (and Schulberg) did at the HUAC committee a few years earlier. Was this their way of justifying their actions? They say no, but a person can make up their own mind. It's also an anti-union film in the sense that it is suggesting that unions are corrupt, but of course that was just stating a fact. At a few points through the film Malden's character talks about what a union should be doing, so I'm not sure it's a blanket condemnation of all labor unions.

The film won eight Oscars, which tied a record at that time. In addition to Brando, Kazan, Schulberg and Saint won, while Cobb, Steiger and Malden were nominated. Kazan richly deserved the award, as his direction is both subtle yet has a tremendous style. Consider the scene where Brando confesses to Saint his involvement in her brother's death. Kazan shoots it from a variety of angles, but mostly in long shots, and we don't hear all of it, as the sounds of machinery and steam whistles drowns them out. Meanwhile Malden watches from far above. It's a masterly scene of direction, acting, writing, photography and editing.

Finally, keep a lookout for a tall actor playing one of the union stooges. Yes, that's Fred Gwynne, later to be famous for his tenure as Herman Munster.