ON THE WATERFRONT

(1954)

Starring Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Lee J.Cobb, Rod Steiger, Karl Malden; dir: Elia Kazan

There is a love story at the center of On The Waterfront and it constitutes the film’s best quality. Not only does it drive the ostensible narrative forward (the film is largely a subtext), it’s vital to the character transition in Brando’s Terry Malloy. We need to justify the incredible effort Brando is putting into his characterisation, and its trajectory – Terry’s movement – is best explained by the humanity emerging and growing in him through the force of commonalities being discovered between his and Eva Marie Saint’s character, Edie.

Her Dad, a co-worker of Terry’s, has carefully protected her from the harsh blue collar realities (she has been a nun-in-training) while Malloy’s ‘family’ – brother Charley (Rod Steiger in a brilliant performance) and surrogate father Johnny Friendly (the corrupt union boss played by Lee J.Cobb) manipulated Terry’s gifts as a boxer to line their own (camel’s hair) pockets at the expense of curdling this young brother’s potential (hence the now strip-mined "contender" line in the still-potent taxi ride scene).

Edie’s innocence has never been corrupted. As we see in the scenes with the kids on the rooftop especially, Terry is equally soft and gooey and if not as idealistic, he still has a moral compass. Only his environment and upbringing ("after Dad got rubbed out…", he explains to her) have hardened him. Watching them gradually come together is very natural and rings with surprisingly gentle truth for such a strident director.

These characterisations are shown as preparing the emotional ground for the plot shifts which, with Kazan’s typically assured muscularity, effortlessly take on the dynamics of a dark thriller in Waterfront ‘s second half.

Karl Malden gives a career-best performance, even if he does play his crusading priest like a fedora-wearing homicide dick. But Lee J.Cobb has too much innate authority and gravitas to pull off the corrupt character of Friendly (like Kazan, Cobb was also a ‘friendly’ witness before HUAC) with the authenticity his gruff-but-honest persona brings to most of his roles (which helps explain the dissatisfying The Man Who Cheated Himself, with Cobb shifting overnight from evidence-tampering but honest detective to outright fugitive status). Eva Marie Saint however is perfectly balanced here between rectitude and fragility.

The problem with On The Waterfront is itself. It is an inappropriate conceit, to put it mildly, to metaphorically equate ratting out your colleagues’ murderous corruption to ratting out your colleagues’ privately held ideological beliefs. The irony is that the film’s message, the individual must stand up to conformist pressures, is the opposite of Kazan’s actions in surrendering to conformist pressure to appease the House Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearings. An interesting comparison can be made in the self-justification stakes with Edward Dmytryk’s The Caine Mutiny (also 1954), in which an ageing Humphrey Bogart deputises for Dmytryk by explaining why he folded under pressure, just as the director did after his Crossfire (1947) put him in HUAC’s crosshairs.

Studies of corruption were a recurring theme in Kazan’s work from as early as 1947’s Boomerang, which looked at behind-the-scenes machinations at the municipal level in a ‘wrong man accused’ situation; Kazan later said he’d been naïve in Boomerang and saw that "civic corruption is much more widespread". His latest and best examination was the little known A Face in the Crowd (1957), which took on the bigger canvas of national politics. Predating not only Reagan but the first televisual President, JFK, A Face in the Crowd explicitly shows how a ruthlessly cynical media star can campaign for power as a willing pawn of politics’ back-room boys. As its lead, a young Andy Griffiths, resembles George Dubya Bush, it’s scarily resonant today.

The final irony is that this film, On The Waterfront, born out of such a particular time, lives on through successive ages because its theme (however open to misrepresentation) continues to be so timeless and fundamental to human experience.