The Water Front
The Oscar belonged to Brando through A Streetcar Named Desire but it went to Humphrey Bogart for The African Queen. He was nominated again for Viva Zapata and Julius Caesar, but left empty handed again. For this harsh tale of New York Dockers Brando’s craft was finally acknowledged.
His Terry Malloy, a failed boxer wrestling with his conscience after bumping off a workmate for union boss Johnny Friendly (the magnificent Cobb), is a subtle mess of half-formed emotions. But the film is a bleak look at corruption and the indignity of labour that humanises the industrial tribunal.
New fangled Method acting comes across most controlled and poetic in his awkward love scenes with Eva Marie Saint (playing dead man’s sister Edie Doyle). His speech in the taxi with his brother Charlie (Rod Steiger) remains one of those classics: “I coulda been a contender, I coulda been somebody, instead of just a bum, which is what I am.”
For this we must salute screenwriter Budd Schulberg (his speech for priest Karl Malden in the loading bay is still stirring).
Add restrained score by Leonard Bernstein and striking, charcoal look by cinematographer Boris Kaufman to the acting/writing heroics and you have an elegiac portrait of labour relations that feels like a kick in the slats. And that’s merely 30 years later.
Director Elia Kazan made it with writer Budd Schulberg after they ratted on their pals to the McCarthy commission and needed to do a picture about how informers were noble brave souls facing up to oppression rather than sneaky squealers saving their careers; so it’s hard to like it that much.
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