One-way Ticket to Palookaville

By Ed Rampell, AlterNet. Posted December 17, 2004.

Filmmaker Elia Kazan once commented: "If there's a better performance by a man in the history of film in America, I don't know what it is." He was speaking of Marlon Brando's performance – in Kazan's "On the Waterfront" – as Terry Malloy, a washed-up boxer-turned-longshoreman-turned-informer.

The 1954 classic won eight Academy Awards: Best Picture, Actor (Marlon Brando), Supporting Actress (Eva Marie Saint), Cinematography (Boris Kaufman), Original Screenplay (Budd Schulberg) and Director (Elia Kazan). To celebrate its 50th anniversary, and perhaps to commemorate Brando's death earlier this year, Sony Pictures Classics is re-releasing "Waterfront" with a new 35mm print restored from the original negative, and digitally re-mastered sound, featuring Leonard Bernstein's Oscar-nominated score.

Brando's improvisational acting in "Waterfront" still packs a punch. He was tender in love scenes opposite Saint, spontaneously picking up her dropped glove and squeezing his paw into it, decades before Johnnie Cochran crooned: "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."

And certainly, no actor ever acquitted himself better than Brando did in the role of Malloy, becoming the youngest thespian at that point to win the Best Actor Oscar. The film's most famous scene takes place in a taxi's backseat, as Terry's shyster brother Charlie (Rod Steiger) pulls a gun on the ex-pugilist to stop his testifying against mobsters. Improvising, Brando reminds Charlie that his order to throw a fight had ruined Terry's boxing career:

...What do I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville. You was my brother, Charlie ... You should have taken care of me better ... I could have had class. I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it. It was you, Charlie ...

Kazan was already an accomplished stage and screen director when he made "On the Waterfront." In the 1940s, Kazan had directed the Broadway debuts of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" and Brando in "A Streetcar Named Desire" (as well as 1951's screen version). After "Waterfront," Kazan went on to direct James Dean in 1955's "East of Eden" and Warren Beatty in 1961's "Splendor in the Grass." But as "On the Waterfront" is re-released it's important for 21st-century audiences to place the movie in its proper historical context as a case study in Red Scare movie propaganda.

In 1952, Kazan was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where he named eight people from the Group Theater who in the 1930s, along with him, had been members of the American Communist Party. Rubbing salt in the wound, Kazan justified his squealing with a self-serving New York Times ad. According to Victor Navasky's "Naming Names," "Kazan emerged in the folklore of the left as the quintessential informer ..."

"On the Waterfront," made shortly after what is widely perceived as Kazan's treachery, is a cleverly camouflaged attempt to justify informing. Betrayal is the film's theme. Brando's character raises pigeons – an explicit reference to "stool pigeons." Like Kazan, screenwriter Schulberg was an ex-Communist who informed to HUAC.

Despite his stellar stage and screen work, Kazan is probably best remembered as "'notorious,' an 'informer,' a 'squealer,' a 'rat,'" as Kazan's own memoir put it. In his 1988 autobiography "A Life," Kazan called himself "the bone of contention." He remains so, even in death, according to those who were touched by the Hollywood blacklist. If there was an Oscar for the Most Hated, it might have been awarded to Kazan. Instead, he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Oscar.

When, in 1999, the Motion Picture Academy awarded him the prestigious award, critics protested actively. "I'll be watching, hoping someone shoots him," declared ex-Red Abe Polonsky, whose career as a screenwriter and director of hits such as "Body and Soul" and "Force of Evil" was cut short in the 1940s by the Hollywood blacklist. "When he goes to Dante's last circle in hell, he'll sit right next to Judas," the late Polonsky insisted at the time.

Asked about his reaction to the news of Kazan's death in September 2003, Ed Asner – who had his own battles with censorship – said that he thought "snitching must be good for longevity." Nat Segaloff, a blacklist scholar and former vice president of the American Civil Liberties Union's Hollywood chapter, said, "I'm ashamed to say I sang, 'Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead.'"

Blacklisted screenwriter Norma Barzman said "You don't rejoice when somebody dies. Death is always sobering. I didn't think about his death, so much as I thought about his life. What was that really when the Academy awarded him a Lifetime Achievement Oscar? At the time, we victims of the blacklist said: 'He had two Oscars for his films, and we'd gladly have given him two more Oscars for his work.' It wasn't a question of that. Lifetime Achievement to us was a very dramatic thing."

Bernie Gordon, another blacklisted screenwriter, chuckled when asked about his reaction to Kazan's passing. "He was 94 ... It was about time, he lived a long life. Maybe, in my opinion, he lived too long. But I'm not going to get into ... whether somebody should or should not die," said Gordon, who scripted the only movie Ron and Nancy Reagan appeared in together – 1957's "Hellcats of the Navy" – under a pseudonym. "If Shakespeare was right about Caesar, then the evil Kazan did will live after him," he added.

'On the Waterfront' plays Dec. 17-24 at Kendall Square Cinema, Cambridge; Dec. 17-23 at Midtown Art Cinema, Atlanta; Dec. 24-30 at Nuart Theater, Los Angeles; and Dec. 24-27 at Castro Theatre, San Francisco. L.A.-based film critic and freelancer Ed Rampell’s latest film history book, Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States, is being published by DisInfo in early 2005.