Two years after High Noon, a film that basically told the same story in a more modern setting was voted “Best Picture” and it’s star, Marlon Brando, won “Best Actor” and solidified his position as the iconic actor of his generation.
Like High Noon, One the Waterfront cannot be fully understood unless you know it’s back story. It was directed by Elia Kazan, who had established himself as the most respected director of the era on both the stage and in the movies. Born in Turkey to a family of Greek decent, he emigrated to America at age 4 and heard stories of the slaughter of Greeks and Armenians from his parents, creating a fear of oppression in his mind. He went to Yale and attended the school of drama there, then went back to New York and was one of a bunch of idealistic actors, writers and directors who formed the Group Theatre to produce socially conscious plays. It was the Depression and people were dissatisfied with the government and economic system that produced such a crisis and looked for alternatives. For about a year and half in 1934-35, Kazan considered communism as an alternative:
The Group Theatre said that we shouldn't be committed to any fixed political program set by other people outside the organization. I was behaving treacherously to the Group when I met downtown at CP [Communist Party] headquarters, to decide among the Communists what we should do in the Group, and then come back and present a united front, pretending we had not been in caucus... I was tried by the Party and that was one of the reasons I became so embittered later. The trial was on the issue of my refusal to follow instructions, that we should strike in the Group Theatre, and insist that the membership have control of its organization. I said it was an artistic organization, and I backed up Clurman and Strasberg who were not Communists... The trial left an indelible impression on me... Everybody else voted against me and they stigmatized me and condemned my acts and attitude. They were asking for confession and self-humbling. I went home that night and told my wife "I am resigning." But for years after I resigned, I was still faithful to their way of thinking. I still believed in it. But not in the American Communists. I used to make a difference and think: "These people here are damned fools but in Russia they have got the real thing," until I learned about the Hitler-Stalin pact, and gave up on the USSR.
Most of his contemporaries did, too, but their early association with the party would come back to haunt them.
Kazan went on to great success, directing The Skin of Our Teeth, All My Sons, A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman on stage and directing the films A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Gentleman’s Agreement, Pinky, A Streetcar Named Desire and A Panic in the Streets. He co-founded the Actor’s Studio and was a mentor to an entire generation of famous actors, including Montgomery Clift, John Garfield, Francis Farmer, Will Geer, Harry Morgan, Howard Da Silva Lee J. Cobb, Karl Malden, Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, Eli Wallach, Patricia Neal, Mildred Dunnock, James Whitmore, Maureen Stapleton, Rod Steiger and James Dean. In addition he was a close friend and leading interpreter of the works of Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. There was no one more prominent and respected in American Drama in the early 1950’s than Elia Kazan.
Kazan was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, (HUAC) in January 1952. He was asked to name the names of the people who had been in the Communist Party when he was a member and refused. Faced with the termination of career, he thought:
To defend a secrecy I don’t think right and to defend people who have already been named or soon would be by someone else... I hate the Communists and have for many years, and don’t feel right about giving up my career to defend them. I will give up my film career if it is in the interests of defending something I believe in, but not this.
So, in April 1952 he agreed to testify and named the names they wanted, earning the perpetual contempt of his former friends. This, in turn caused him to have contempt for them:
I would rather do what I did than crawl in front of a ritualistic Left and lie the way those other comrades did, and betray my own soul. I didn't betray it. I made a difficult decision.
(quotes from Wikipedia)
Meanwhile, writer Budd Schulberg was working on a script about the New York waterfronts. Schulberg had also been a “friendly” witness before HUAC. He based his script on a series of Pulitzer-prize winning articles by Malcolm Johnson of the New York Sun about “widespread corruption, extortion and racketeering on the waterfront of Manhattan and Brooklyn”. His story was about an ex-boxer who witnesses a murder but refuses to tell anybody about it until his priest and the victim’s sister persuade him to testify before the Waterfront Commission. He’s then ostracized and eventually murdered for doing so.
Kazan and Shulberg saw in this story a way of making “naming names” appear heroic and decided to make the film although Kazan changed the ending so Terry survives and triumphs by defying the racketeer running the longshoreman’s union to lead the men, now defiant because they have a leader, to work.
Like High Noon, the film was instantly recognized for what it was really about, at least in the eyes of those who were aware of Kazan’s testimony. Hollywood, at the height of the “McCarthy Era”, gave the film every award it could think of:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_VJtDZBttY
Those who resented what Kazan had done had a very different view and still had one when he was given an honorary Oscar 45 years later: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YziNNCZeNs
Many people refused to stand or applaud when he was introduced. An even dimmer view is held by those who were members of the longshoreman’s union, particularly those who were admirers of Harry Bridges, the long time leader of the International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union, whom they felt had been libeled by the “Johnny Friendly” character. Bridges had had a lot of trouble with the US Government and was labeled a communist himself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Bridges
Martin Scorsese had a different view. He knew nothing about this background when he first saw the film as a 12 year old. As he said in the recent PBS “American Masters” documentary “A Letter to Elia”, he saw his own neighborhood: a place where you didn’t snitch or you might wind up in the river. Except for the upbeat ending, which he describes as “a fantasy”, (the endings of most films are), he found every frame of the film a valid representation of an environment he knew very well. The film was one of those that convinced him to become a filmmaker.
I can’t defend what Kazan did but I can look at this film and see it for what it is: High Noon in a setting where it makes sense. Longshoreman are notoriously tough in a barroom brawl sense but their lives are dominated by their bosses: their company bosses, (as represented by the unsympathetic looking character we see in the film’s climatic scene) and by their union bosses, (and the real union bosses watched this film being made: Kazan had to have a bodyguard). They know what happens when you stick your neck out.
Politics aside, the same audience could watch High Noon and see themselves as Will Kane and two years later watch On the Waterfront and see themselves as Terry Malloy. There’s no contradiction in that at all because both movies are ultimately about courage and the fact that, when you do the right thing, it’s not usually going to be to a standing ovation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1idnsOUjixQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XLbRI0kdLg&feature=related
(Compare Karl Malden’s speech here to the letter Henry Fonda reads at the end of The Ox Bow Incident)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeVq1e6JKlw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6VBdu_ur48&feature=related
(The dramatic music was written by Leonard Bernstein, who had been listed as a Communist by Red Channels in 1950)
The past is a series of presents. The present is living history we are priviledged to witness
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schappe1
13 years ago
On the Waterfront was not the only movie made about unions in 1954. A film called Salt of the Earth was financed by the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, which had it’s origins in the western mines created in the 19th century:
“The Western Federation of Miners was frontier unionism, the organization of workers who had become "wage slaves" of mining corporations rather recently acquired by back-east absentee ownership. They built their union when they were not yet "broken in" to the discipline of business management. [The WFM] had the militancy of the undisciplined recruits ... From the founding of the Western Federation in 1893, its story for twelve years is that of a continuous search for solidarity” The WDM, (which became the IUMMSW) was considered one of the more radical unions and the government was investigating them for Communist infiltration. The union declined to remove alleged Communists from their leadership and the CIO, which they had helped found, expelled them in 1950 because of this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Federation_of_Miners
Meanwhile, there had been a strike at a zinc mine in New Mexico in 1950 in which the union had helped Mexican-American workers obtain the same pay and benefits as their “Anglo” counterparts. An extra aspect of this story was that their wives had founded an auxiliary of the union and taken a major role in manning the picket lines in exchange for concessions they wanted in their living conditions. The union felt that this story should be dramatized and decided to finance a film on a budget of $250,000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_of_the_Earth
They decided to hire people who had been blacklisted to make the film but also to hire the people who had been involved with the strike to play themselves. Paul Jarrico, the producer, Herbert Biberman, the director and Michael Wilson, the writer were all blacklisted.
Kazan’s former protégé, Will Geer, (much later “Grandpa” on The Waltons), played the local Sheriff. After refusing to testify before HUAC, he had to move to a rustic spot in Topanga Canyon where they grew their own produce, (he had studied botany in college and eventually had a collection of every plant mentions in Shakespeare’s plays). Geer created the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum which specifically employed blacklisted actors. David Wolfe played the company foreman and Mervyn Williams and David Sarvis executives. Only Geer’s film/TV career continued after this film and he didn’t appear in anything else until Advise and Consent in 1962.
The one other professional actor is the real star of the film, Rosaura Revueltas, a Mexican actress who’s father had been a mine worker and who did the film to honor him. She didn’t work again either country for 22 years. The film was itself blacklisted, the only film ever to have had this “honor”. The company was harassed and even shot at while the picture was in production. The film when shot had to be hidden in an old shack so it wouldn’t be stolen. Most labs refused to process it. Only 12 theaters in the United States were willing to show the film and Roy Brewer the head of the International Alliance of Theatrical Employees, refused to allow any union projectionist to work the projectors.
http://www.culturevulture.net/Books/Suppression.htm
A few reviewers did manage to see the film. Pauline Kael called it “Communist propaganda”. But Bosley Crowther said "In the light of this agitated history, it is somewhat surprising to find that Salt of the Earth is, in substance, simply a strong pro-labor film with a particularly sympathetic interest in the Mexican-Americans with whom it deals...But the real dramatic crux of the picture is the stern and bitter conflict within the membership of the union. It is the issue of whether the women shall have equality of expression and of strike participation with the men.”
I agree with Crowther. Looking at it now, it is a rather benign story of how some minimal improvements in the lot of the miners and their families were obtained with the help of their union. The only reference to communism is in one scene where one of the executives warns a union man to not fall in with “the Reds”. There’s no suggestion that we need a different system of economics or government. The union representative is as far from Johnny Friendly as could be imagined. When the foreman tells him to get his men back to work, he says “They don’t work for me. I work for them.”
The most interesting aspect of the film is the role of the women, who take over the picket lines when the men are ordered back to work under the Taft-Hartley Act. They take the brunt of the Sheriff’s efforts to break the strike for the company and earn the respect of their men, who had not previously considered their interests. When they get jailed, the men have to take over domestic duties and find out how hard that is in scenes that almost look like they were from The Honeymooners, (which as on at this time). The final triumph is not just of the workers but of the women which makes this a singular film for it’s era. But it’s so apolitical that it could easily have been done as an episode of a TV series like Name of the Game or Lou Grant not so many years later.
It would have made an interesting double bill with On the Waterfront but that wasn’t possible at the time. It’s not as powerful a film. The actors, being primarily non-professionals, lack the power of Brando, Steiger and Cobb. There isn’t a classic hero or villain and no climatic fist-fight. The score isn’t by Leonard Bernstein. But Salt of the Earth has some quiet power of it’s own and shows that union guys aren’t necessarily bad guys.
That wasn’t a popular point of view in the 50’s and very few people saw this film until years later. As mentioned, anybody associated with it didn’t work for years. The INS suddenly decided that Revueltas should be deported. Revueltas once said that "[since [the INS] had no evidence to present of my 'subversive' character, I can only conclude that I was 'dangerous' because I had been playing a role that gave status and dignity to the character of a Mexican-American woman."
I thought I recognized one of the “professional” actors in the film as Seymour Cassel, who later appeared in many of John Cassavetes’ films:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001025/mediaindex
But that’s not Seymour. Instead it’s one of the “non-professionals“, Clinton Jenck, playing the union rep, which is, in fact, what he was:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_Jencks
He was also the plaintiff in a famous supreme court case:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jencks_v._United_States
…which said, basically that you can’t convict someone of a crime unless you actually produce the evidence that he was guilty, a pretty basic concept in a democracy.
http://www.archive.org/details/salt_of_the_earth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_of_the_Earth
The past is a series of presents. The present is living history we are priviledged to witness
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activista
10 years ago
That's some pretty interesting stuff--- I saw the film years ago, and you'd think with all that controversy that surrounded it,that it was a Communist party tract or something---which it wasn't. What's tripped out about that whole situation surrounding the film is that it dosen't seem if the people working like hell to stop the film from being made or seen had even bothered to actually see it themselves! That's pretty crazy in itself,frankly.
I totally disagree about Kazan's actions---I think he just wanted to keep his career,period,like most of the people who named names at that time. I don't think he was any kind of a noble witness or anything on top of that---he made some great movies though, like On The Waterfront.
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