AFI #19: On The Waterfront (1954)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on August 7, 2020.

This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas are closed and I have to review something.

(PG) ★★★★★

Director: Elia Kazan.

Cast: Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Eva Marie Saint, Rod Steiger, Pat Henning, John F. Hamilton, Leif Erickson, James Westerfield, Fred Gwynne, Rudy Bond, Martin Balsam, Katherine MacGregor.

Not pictured: the waterfront.

Many films are difficult to separate from the circumstances around their making. Apocalypse Now's production was a shitstorm of apocalyptic proportions. Many saw Raging Bull as Scorsese's therapy, as he exorcised his cocaine demons in a boxing ring. And On The Waterfront is indelibly linked to what its director Elia Kazan and writer Budd Schulberg did two years before the film's release.

Kazan and Schulberg were so-called "friendly witnesses" before the US Government's communist witch hunt, the House Un-American Activities Committee. They named names and detailed the political allegiances of a number of Hollywood folk, effectively ending the careers of the people Kazan and Schulberg outed. Kazan was seen as a rat, as opposed to a whistleblower. When he received an honorary Oscar in 1999, almost half a century after he doomed numerous colleagues to the dreaded Hollywood blacklist, half the audience remained seated, refusing to applaud. The after-effects of his testimony lingered long.

The hero of On The Waterfront is a whistleblower, seen by his colleagues as a rat. For Kazan, this one was personal. As he wrote in his 1988 autobiography, "On the Waterfront is my own story; every day I worked on that film, I was telling the world where I stood and my critics to go and fuck themselves."

"Did someone just tell me to go fuck myself?"

Kazan mistakes or misunderstands his place in history - what he did is not even close to comparable to Terry Malloy's stand against the corrupt union bosses and Mafioso that ran the docks of New Jersey to suit their own ends and fatten their own pockets. He ruined the careers of some of is former friends because of their one-time affiliation with a political organisation to appease a corrupt arm of government. 

Some critics can't separate the film from the film-makers' actions - Jonathan Rosenbaum told fellow reviewer Roger Ebert he could “never forgive” Kazan for using the film to justify himself. In Rosenbaum's review, he called On The Waterfront "self-serving" and "pretty pretentious". Similarly, in The Great Movies, William Bayer agreed the film "is surrounded by ambiguities which cannot be wished away".

"It is possible to argue - and many have - that On The Waterfront is not the film it seems because it is really a self-serving effort used by Kazan to justify his own actions," wrote Bayer.

But shorn of Kazan's post-curricular activities, On The Waterfront deserves all the accolades it can get (which included eight Oscars and four Golden Globes). It looks unlike any other film of its era, embracing a documentary-style in places to help deliver its gritty realism. Not even Leonard Bernstein's saccharine schmaltzy score can undo the power of the film, which is a triumph of naturalism, led by a cast of Method acting acolytes.

Leader of those disciples is Brando, giving one of his two Oscar-winning performances. He perfectly conveys the creeping weight of conscience as it rests on the shoulders of the simple-minded Malloy - a boxer with heart who slowly awakens to the corruption around him on the docks of New Jersey. But on top of being a stand-out in the movie, his ragged turn is seen by many as a turning point in acting. His Oscar helped validate drama teacher Stella Adler and the Stanislavski system, but it also (along with his performance in A Streetcar Named Desire) revolutionised acting. 

Brando also gave a lot of credit to Kazan for his acting skills. One of Kazan's great talents as a director was the way he worked with actors, and in On The Waterfront, he populates his cast with a stellar line-up to weave his magic with. Cobb is commanding as mob boss Joe Friendly, Steiger is under-rated (and more than holds his own in the famous "contender" scene) as Malloy's older brother Charlie, Maldon brings the right amount of believable fire and brimstone to the role of Father Barry, and Saint gives depth to what could have been a forgettable role in her film debut (Kazan's other great skill was finding actors - he's credited with "discovering" not only Saint, but also James Dean, Warren Beatty and Jack Palance).

But On The Waterfront and its committed cast would have been nothing without Schulberg's script, which took a series of articles about real-life corruption on the docks of New York and New Jersey and carved out a strong plot about a corrupt union killing workers who would dare to speak out against it. It's a meaty tale of good and evil, honesty and judgement, conscience and guilt, hawks and pigeons, and heaven and hell, with a heavy dose of Catholicism throughout the film - Malloy is unsubtly elevated to Christ-like level by the film's end, his final walk mirroring Jesus' stations of the cross.

That element attracts detractors. While some denounce the film's "overblown pretentiousness" (as Bayer's otherwise complimentary review puts it), it might be more accurate to characterise it as passion. That passion is at its heights in Maldon's fiery but under-rated crucifixion speech, and played low-key in the contender speech, but it's always there, giving heart to a film that has big things to say.

"On The Waterfront offers the required amount of social comment: on the exploitation of the working class, of the toughness of life at the bottom, on the dehumanisation of meaningless labour," wrote Bayer. "As a film of concern, On The Waterfront is about the best the American cinema has to offer."

There were "issue" films before On The Waterfront, but the ones that came after owe it a debt for the level of realism it injected into its modern day morality play. For all their misdeeds, Brando and Kazan had a profound effect on cinema, and much of it stems from this gritty dockside drama.