On the Waterfront (1954)
Longshoreman Terry Malloy rats on the crooked union, proving that ratting isn’t so bad.
Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) coulda been a contender. He coulda been somebody. But after his mobster brother Charley (Rod Steiger) has him take a dive in a rigged fight, his boxing dreams are dashed and he’s left a bum. Terry ends up as a longshoreman and an errand-boy for the mob, but when one of his “errands” gets someone killed, he realizes that, oh gee, these mobsters might not really be his friends after all.
Here’s the thing: director Elia Kazan wrote this movie to justify naming names in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee and as a direct rebuke to his erstwhile friend Arthur Miller’s parable, “The Crucible.”1 Marlon Brando put it bluntly in his autobiography: “[Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg] made [On the Waterfront] to justify finking on their friends.” As the viewer, then, I was a bit squeamish about being complicit to an act of history revisionism.
Thankfully, the movie overcomes its unfortunate genesis. It’s full of layered performances and top-tier filmmaking (Orson Welles once said that “Kazan is a traitor […] [but] he is a very fine director”), and it ends up being easy to root against the evil mobsters and for the simple Brando. Of course Terry should stand up to the mob, of course he’s the hero in the climactic finger-pointing courtroom scene, of course Elia Kazan did nothing wrong. Oh wait.
Rating: 8/10, it adds useful context to the eternal debate about whether or not snitches get stitches.
Cast and Crew
Marlon Brando picked up another Oscar nod for Waterfront, his fourth consecutive year with one. That’s an all-time great run right there, and that’s without recognizing his work in The Men (1950) or The Wild One (1953). This is also the first time that he comes away with the hardware—and maybe it’s made all the sweeter that he won it over Bogart, to whom he had lost in 1951.
Leonard Bernstein2, the left-wing director of the New York Philharmonic, scored On the Waterfront. He’s most famous for doing the music for “West Side Story,” which accompanied Stephen Sondheim’s book and Jerome Robbins’ choreography (yeah, you have to know all three of those guys). Bernstein also did the musical “On the Town,” which features the song “New York, New York.”3 Beyond his composing, he was a famed music educator, both on CBS’ “Young People’s Concerts” and in a Harvard lecture series.4
Oscar winner Karl Malden co-starred as Father Barry. He’s most distinctive for his enormous, enormous nose, but don’t let it distract you from the fact that the man can act.
Malden played Mitch, the schmuck who dates Blanche, in A Streetcar Named Desire. It’s an impressive turn, then, for Malden to play the upright, forceful priest whose strength helps Terry testify. Malden’s crucifixion scene in this film is stunning. We’ll have the pleasure of seeing Malden again in this column, so we’ll get to his commercials for American Express traveler’s checks and the TV show “Streets of San Francisco” later.
Lee J. Cobb played the unambiguously, comically evil union boss Johnny Friendly, for which he scored an Oscar nom. It’s not a subtle or particularly interesting performance—I mean, at one point, he literally snatches money from an underling while growling “GIMME! GIMME! GIMME!”5 Ah well. Cobb is best known for originating the role of Willy Loman on Broadway (we saw Fredric March play that role in a film adaptation) and as Juror #3 in 1957’s 12 Angry Men.
Elia Kazan, the snitchy Greek director6, is a Hollywood legend. He’s famed for his character-driven films about social issues and for getting world-class performances out of his actors. He won a Best Director statue for Waterfront and another for 1947’s Gentleman’s Agreement, a film where Gregory Peck poses as a Jew to expose anti-Semitism.7 He directed A Streetcar Named Desire and Viva Zapata!, both of which we’ve discussed, and we’ll see him again in 1955 when he helms a Steinbeck adaptation.
The Trivia
Discussing Terry’s boxing career, Charley says Terry could’ve been another Billy Conn. Billy Conn, a boxer whose career ran from 1934 to 1948, was famed for challenging Joe Louis in two heavyweight title bouts. Joe Louis, who comes up in trivia all the time, was the Brown Bomber and had the most wins in heavyweight title fights in boxing history during his reign from 1937 to 1949.8 His most famous fight was probably his rematch against Max Schmeling in 1938, where he knocked out the German in the 1st.9 But let’s talk about Joe Louis and Billy Conn.
In 1941, Billy Conn was the reigning light heavyweight champion of the world. He challenged Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion of the world, despite weighing 25 pounds less than him. Their fight was the first televised World Heavyweight Championship fight10 and it was a good one. Going into round 13, Conn was leading on the scorecard. Conn then made the headstrong decision to go for a knockout instead of playing defensively and preserving his lead. This left him open to getting knocked out by Louis, which is exactly what happened.
Later, when Conn jokingly asked why Louis couldn’t let him win and have the title for, say, six months, Louis replied “I let you have [the title] for twelve rounds and you couldn’t keep it. How could I let you have it for six months?”11
Interestingly, On the Waterfront featured three uncredited actors that all fought Joe Louis in real life for the heavyweight title. They, like Billy Conn, were all KOed. Joe Louis was real good at boxing.
Odds and Ends
Rod Steiger played Terry’s crooked brother Charley; he, along with the basically the rest of the cast, got an Oscar nod…The role of Terry almost went to Frank Sinatra, which would have made this movie much, much worse…On the Waterfront is the film debut of Eva Marie Saint, who plays Terry’s love interest Edie…Terry talks about his one-way ticket to Palookaville; a palooka is a below-average prizefighter…a priest who sees Father Barry’s scheme of getting dock workers to testify says Barry’ll be sent off to Abyssinia; Abyssinia is an exonym for Ethiopia…Edie says she’s in a college run by the Sisters of St. Anne; St. Anne is the mother of the Virgin Mary, though she’s only known through the Apocrypha…the Marquess of Queensberry rules, which govern boxing, were named for the brutish John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, who Oscar Wilde famously sued for libel over his accusations that Wilde was sleeping with the Marquess’ son.12
Oh, and speaking of longshoremen? Yeah, the best season of “The Wire” is season two—Ta-Nehisi Coates’ take is dead on.
Miller started writing “The Crucible” (1953), a play that uses the Salem Witch Trials as an allegory for McCarthyism, immediately after hearing Kazan’s testimony in front of HUAC.
Get his name right: the second syllable rhymes with “fine.” This pronunciation is a major point in Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic,” which is about a party Lenny threw for the Black Panthers.
Note that it’s the “New York, New York” song where the next line is “it’s a helluva town / the Bronx is up but The Battery’s down.” Maybe you know “The Simpsons” parody of it.
Anything else? Yep—he was the first American to conduct at La Scala, he did an operetta based on Voltaire’s “Candide,” he wrote a symphony about the Biblical prophet Jeremiah…I mean, he was just a huge, huge figure in 20th century conducting and composing.
Now, maybe this is a feature, not a bug, since Cobb’s playing a guy based on Albert Anastasia, known as the Lord High Executioner of Murder, Inc.
Kazan’s actions in front of HUAC hung over him for the rest of his career. Even in the ‘90s, there were protests at the Oscars when he received an honorary award for his contributions to the film industry. Kazan said he was between Scylla and Charybdis, though, and I’m mostly pillorying him as a goof. Who knows how any of us would act under the bright lights of the Red Scare?
Cool plot! This is also the idea behind the nonfiction work “Black Like Me” (1961), where white journalist John Howard Griffin darkened his skin and then traveled through the Deep South.
He successfully defended his title the most times but he isn’t the heavyweight who held the title for the longest. That superlative goes to Wladimir Klitschko, Hayden Panettiere’s former partner. (And you thought Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce were weird together!)
This was called “the Fight of the Century”; it happened in 1938, though, so I gotta say, that naming was pretty presumptuous. Later, the first Frazier-Ali bout received that same moniker, as if to say, whoops, no, actually this one is the fight of the century.
Though it certainly wasn’t the first fight filmed. The first “Fight of the Century,” the 1910 clash between Galveston Giant Jack Johnson and “great white hope” Big Jim Jeffries, was filmed and released as the movie Jeffries-Johnson World's Championship Boxing Contest (1910). You can also watch newsreel footage of other classic old fights, like the Jack Dempsey - Gene Tunney “Long Count Fight.”
Billy Conn fought Joe Louis again in 1946. Coming up to it, Louis said Conn “could run, but he couldn’t hide,” and Louis was right: he knocked Conn out in the eighth.
Wilde lost both his case and a countersuit, leaving him bankrupt.