When you write that Brando and On the Waterfront are "edgy" aren't you saying they are more intense? Brando represented a novel, exciting style of acting, a new level of the art. Bogart is excellent but not more deserving than Brando. Also, Brando was passed over in 1951 for Streetcar Named Desire in favor of, if I'm not mistaken, Bogart in The African Queen. Perhaps Academy voters had this in mind.
To write the film is boring is absolutely ludicrous and I doubt any other poster would agree with you. You appear to hate the film because you don't like Kazan's politics. This is not the way to judge a film except in a totalitarian country, where everything is made political. This is where the U.S. Is trending today under pressure from the radical ("progressive) left.
The blacklist was a terrible period but the fact remains that American communists, under the direction of the Kremlin, were attempting to infiltrate Hollywood craft unions including screenwriters. Every one of the Hollywood Ten belonged to the CPUSA and as proven by our Venona decripts of KGB communications was an agent of Stalin. They were traitors. Not politically correct today, but fact. Ever hear of the Cold War, or was it all our fault (as perhaps Obama thinks)? If you read Paul Kengor's books on Reagan you will learn that, though a New Deal Democrat when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild in the later 1940s, he first became a staunch anti-Communist fighting against the communists' efforts to take over his union. His life was threatened and he had to sleep with a gun beside his bed. In a confrontation with the ringleader of the Ten, John Howard Lawson, he was told angrily by Lawson that democracy meant "socialism" not American democracy. Hypocritically, Lawson and most of the other Ten theatrically denounced the HUAC hiding behind the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech which they were bent on destroying.
Again, many innocent people saw their lives wrecked, but there was serious communist subversion in Hollywood. This is the context in which Kazan named names.
One cannot fairly try to discredit a great film by smearing the director on political grounds. In fact, that is a communist tactic. Would you dismiss Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible because it is meant to glorify Stalin? Kazan's art stands on its own terms. If you cannot see the greatness of the story, the intensity of the "edgy" acting and the stirring scenes, the innovative onsite cinematography and musical score by Leonard
Bernstein, then you are allowing yourself to be blinded by your politics. And your politics are based on a selective, tendentious view of the
period.
reply
share