On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)

Near the beginning of his BFI monograph on On the Waterfront, Leo Braudy writes, "it is tempting to argue that naming names before the HUAC put Kazan into a moral and psychological quandary that paradoxically made him a better director." (8). That may be so. But film history would have survived, and then some, had Kazan kept his quandary to himself and, Abraham Polonsky, whose career was destroyed by the HUAC, been allowed to continue writing and directing masterpieces like Force of Evil (1948), a far superior film than anything Kazan ever achieved and featuring the greatest screenplay in Hollywood history.

So while Braudy offers a welcome refresher on the more immediate subject matter of corruption within the longshoremen's union, that does not negate the fact that On the Waterfront remains easy to read as an apologia for naming names. The structure of apology supersedes any contemporary muckraking into corrupt unions. Or as V.F. Perkins put it in Film as Film, "[t]he personal story overwhelms the political morality-play" (146).

Even at that, though, a director for whom casting is 90% of the art of cinema, as Kazan admitted, will always come off too messagey, actorly, and middlebrow for my tastes. For those who find Rear Window inferior to On the Waterfront, feel free to cluck along with Braudy's assertion that "[c]asting therefore was a crucial element in Kazan's preparation for a film, a procedure totally unlike, say, Hitchcock's, in which the director's total vision of the film dictated a more condescending attitude towards the actors as objects themselves" (45). Me, I'll take Hitch's vulgar Freudianism, breaking the fourth wall, and genius last shot any day.

Still, Brando's performance is for the ages, as if that were ever in doubt. When Terry confesses that "I don't like the country. The crickets make me nervous," he ain't heavy; he's my brother. 

Grade: B+

Other Hollywood films which deserved the Best Picture Oscar much more than On the Waterfront: er, Rear Window, Track of the Cat, Bait, The Other Woman, The Barefoot Contessa, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, A Star is Born, Johnny Guitar, Silver Lode, and such ineligible avant-garde shorts as Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, Gyromorphosis, Evolution, Form Phases IV, etc. I assume Anatahan was ineligible too but if not, throw that on the list as well.