Jeffrey Chown

Northern Illinois University

Let us begin with the end. A joke’s success hangs on the appropriateness of its punch line. A love story depends on the revelation of whether boy and girl achieve union. Mysteries are made not mysterious by the last frame. "Whodunnits" tell us who did it. Quests end in success or failure. Tensions in a narrative generally demand resolution. However, in the case of narratives about social problems, such as labor injustice, corporate greed, racism, sexism, the question of closure is necessarily more complicated. Social problem films depend upon arousing concerns in the audience that go beyond the resolution of the immediate story. Our concern about the problem posed in the narrative has a dual function in that the concern exists both in the space of the story enacted on the screen as well as in a perceived real world that exists beyond the fictional screen. The ending of the story foregrounds the incompatibility of the two worlds. Are we supposed to walk out of the theatre feeling that the problem in the screen story was satisfactorily resolved even though the "real world" concern aroused by the observation of a social problem should not be sated, less we become apathetic? The audience generally expects either explicit calls to action against the putative injustice or implicit inspirational solutions based upon heroic models of action. Social problem films should advance our ethical and empathic spirits. We want to feel ennobled by our concern about the issue; that in itself is a form of closure.

If the above has any truth, then the ending of On the Waterfront does not clearly fit generic expectations. The ending is disquieting, even as the film itself is certainly entertaining and artistically satisfying. The ending's ambiguity has been notorious and extensively discussed, especially in a 1954 polemic by Lindsay Anderson in Sight and Sound titled "The Last Sequence of On the Waterfront," wherein Anderson argued the film’s ending demonstrated fascist sympathies in its emphasis on leaders rather than collective solutions. Anderson’s perspective is of course couched in the political concerns of a 1954 British leftist. The concern in the present essay will be to examine how the ending, as well as the rest of the film, functions for a contemporary audience. This would be an audience far removed from Anderson's concerns, an audience viewing the film as a "classic." However, even within the perspective of history, political concerns do manifest in the experience of the film.

It will be my contention that On the Waterfront's ending functions as something of a cinematic Rohrschach test. In 1954 the ending revealed much about the class politics of the creators of the film and the sensitivities of the original post-World War II audience, which we will examine. However, in contemporary showings, and this would be predominantly either university film courses or art house historical retrospectives, the now venerated classic arouses often perplexed and sometimes antagonistic responses, particularly from neophyte film students. On the Waterfront tells us a good deal about the difference between films then and now, both in changing aesthetics of film reception as well as the political landscape in which a film is received. As with the Rohrschach test, our response may tell much about ourselves, particularly in our sensitivity to the social problems and class politics the original film addressed. I am curious whether the disquieting effect of the ending has much to do with the considerable currency the film still has and whether current audiences need an intervention by an educator or critic in appreciating this currency.

So again, let us begin with the end. The forward thrust of the last half of the narrative of On the Waterfront is towards the question of whether Terry Malloy will cooperate with the Crime Commission and testify about Waterfront racketeering. On the one hand, he is threatened physically by mobsters associated with his brother Charley, while love interest Edie, as well as the Irish-American priest, Father Barry, attempt to persuade him to act upon a conscience based on helping his fellow workers. After his brother is murdered, in an act of vengeance mixed with morality, Terry does decide to testify. However, On the Waterfront deals elliptically with the effect of his testimony on the actual Crime Commission’s hearings. In a veiled shot just after the hearings, we see a "Mr. Big" watching the hearings on television and then instructing his servant not to take calls from Johnny Friendly, the corrupt union boss. For all the anguish over whether Terry should testify, we never actually see much result of his testimony. There is a shot of a tabloid-style newspaper with news that Johnny Friendly will be indicted for murder. Then in a quick scene before the final confrontation, Johnny Friendly takes the guns from his thugs and says, "I’m on the hot seat. We’re a law abiding union." Without further explanation, this seems inconclusive and temporary. We don’t really believe him. More compelling remains the Hollywood dictate that a film end with a dramatic action. Consequently, Terry must face Johnny Friendly outside the courtroom where conflict and resolution can be expressed in terms of physical action. Despite Edie’s pleas to move somewhere else, Terry returns to the docks and demands his right to work. The union’s refusal to allow him to work precipitates a confrontation between Terry and Friendly. Terry rediscovers his boxing prowess and physically attacks the labor boss. As he begins to win the fist fight, the mob of gangsters intervenes and deliver a brutal beating that leaves Terry dazed. Then in an act of stamina and will power, Terry staggers to his feet and leads the workers back into the loading zone, against the wishes of Friendly. In the best interpretation, Terry’s courage and leadership inspires his co-workers to act in their own collective interests by ignoring the directives of the corrupt union boss.

However, the iconography and visual composition of the last scene contributes to the effect that I call disquieting. Kazan cuts to high angle shots of Terry leading a throng of workers into the hangar. As an aggregate, they move by the blustering Johnny Friendly, who stands in counterpoint to their forward motion. A medium close-up, low angle of the well dressed shipyard owner is punctuated with his "Let’s go back to work." He is not too worried about fist fighting on the dock. Then in a long shot, a gigantic door shuts as the workers march en masse into the hangar, as if a gigantic capitalist maw has devoured them. Perhaps my reading of the iconic symbolism of the final image is itself class-based, but to me, this image suggests consumption or erasure. Had Kazan shot a low angle, close-up of workers with determined visages marching into the loading area, we would have had something completely false to the situation, that is workers who seem fulfilled or empowered in their work. Far from it, these men are merely interested in survival. Thus, the visual iconography is appropriate: the fruit of the longshoremen's labor is never established, only their temporary right to work.

Elia Kazan, in an interview, described his interpretation of the workers' plight at this point in the film as follows: "The workers gather around Terry, as if they were going to continue their struggle. But after all they have to work for a living, they're not going into some intellectual state of withdrawal from it. It was as close as I could get to what actually happened on the waterfront."1 In fact, the film reflects quite accurately that corruption and brutality towards the longshoremen did not end either with the actual Crime Commission hearings nor with the publicity afforded by the success of the film. Johnny Friendly shouts "I'll be back!" which was the case in reality even after the film was picking up Oscars.2 Still, Kazan's frequent defense of the film on grounds that it reflected actual circumstance that he and Schulberg experienced is not the final word on how modern audiences will apprehend the film. Audiences mostly judge films by what is on the screen, and that judgment may be affected by class-based sensitivities they bring to the viewing.

André Bazin once marveled at American movies’ ability to show visually the vitality of how Americans work. Yet all the dialogue about work in On the Waterfront is negative and alienated, as is most of its visual rendition. Pop Doyle talks about how one of his arms is longer than the other because of years of swinging a hook. Sarcastic remarks about the status of being a longshoreman abound. The workers seem hardened and stoical. No pride or fulfillment is present in the labor depicted. When one of the longshoremen steals a bottle of Irish whiskey during an unloading, it seems a typical response to the exploitation these workers feel.

This presents a problem with a modern audience. Imagine college students half a century after the film’s premiere watching this film for a general education class. The negative dialogue about blue collar work reconfirms students' own aspirations towards white collar careers. Chances are they relate more to the well dressed shipyard owner who probably lives in the suburbs than to the now united longshoremen marching in solidarity towards another day of alienated labor. In today’s political economy, manufacturing jobs are shipped to the third world and robots replace manual laborers, at least in the eyes of any forward-thinking business major. Students may recognize that On the Waterfront argues for the decency and humanity of the working man, but the film will never suggest to them that these jobs are essential, fulfilling, or worth dying for. College students in 1954 probably reacted the same way, but they would have been a small subset of the mass audience the film was intended for. The original 1954 audience would have included many people capable of fully empathizing with characters who depended on a labor union to protect their basic rights. Again, the ambiguous and disquieting effect of the final image may be entirely appropriate as a statement of both the prospects of the main character beyond the immediate narrative, as well as a modern audience's difficulty with empathy towards the historical situation of work in a manufacturing-based economy.

Kenneth Hey, in his analysis of Leonard Bernstein’s score for the film, makes a similar argument regarding the soundtrack. On the climatic image of Terry reporting for work, a tone of indeterminacy is established by not resolving the final chords, as if the waterfront conflict is far from over, or that Terry working is not necessarily the final expression of his dreams and aspirations (147). Modern audiences share the ambivalence about Terry’s return to manual labor. We would prefer to be with Edie and Father Barry on the shore, looking forward to lives where workman’s compensation is not an issue. Triumphant music would have been ill advised. Terry has no guaranteed contract.

Indeed modern students are perplexed when they discover that labor injustice with the longshoremen did not stop when either: a.) the original crime commission hearings depicted in the film occurred, or, b.) public attention focused on the issue via the popular culture sensation of an eight-Oscar box office hit film. Schulberg has stated the results of the film rather modestly: "One of the things I'm proudest about this picture is something Father Corridan (real life model for Father Barry) said: 'that once the public saw what a shape-up was really like, the mob and the stevedore companies could never hire men like that again.'"3

In a college film class setting, we often ask too much in the assumption that a social realist film can present analysis and prescriptions for social problems such as labor injustice, presumably leading to redress. An essay by Karl Marx might do that, but as Siegfried Kracauer suggested, film clings to the surface of things. On the Waterfront is a popular culture vehicle and is necessarily rather muddy in the recipe it does provide for combating the corruption it exposes so vividly. Terry Malloy is angry about his brother’s murder. So this one man stands up, takes a beating, and in his symbolic crucifixion, workers are inspired to throw off a corrupt union leader?

Put that baldly, the surface logic is never really satisfactory, e.g. now that the workers have abandoned Johnny Friendly and marched into the maw, what do they replace him with? Earlier it was mentioned that British film director Lindsay Anderson was incensed with the politics of the final images. He felt the film’s ending presented a model where workers bent and swayed with the whims of powerful leaders, the workers unable to make up their mind about anything beyond their immediate well being. Kazan has responded that he and Schulberg were being true to what they saw and that: "What we intended to show at the end was that the workers there had found, or thought they'd found, a new potential leader. He had almost been killed, remember? And very often, in the labor movement, a new movement starts with the death of a person, through the memory of a martyr." (Baer, 176)

This is certainly true. Even a documentary film such as Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County U.S.A., which gives a thoroughly realistic background and context to a labor struggle, still depends on footage of individual leaders who seek to motivate the apathetic collective. However, in that academy award winning film, we don’t find out about the leaders’ romantic lives, nor are they represented as romantic and charismatic. This discussion should remind us once again that we are dealing with a Hollywood film and a distinguished one at that. The more we attend to what On the Waterfront does not do, the more we lose sight of what it did do.

On the Waterfront won an impressive eight Academy Awards, was lucrative at the box office, and did much to solidify the stardom of Marlon Brando and its director, Elia Kazan. Historically, the film was an early example of independent filmmaking, by that I mean feature filmmaking outside the confines of Hollywood studios that gained a measure of artistic success in the process. Method acting and a new approach to masculinity were also advanced in Brando’s performance, as David Thomson discusses in this volume. In most historical accounts of Hollywood in the 1950s, On the Waterfront stands as one of the most important films of the decade because of its innovation, influence, and daring.

Yet for all this same artistic brilliance and historical importance, as I have been trying to suggest, it remains a difficult film to screen for a modern audience of college students. Any film from the 1950s will demonstrate visual codes and ideological assumptions differing from our vantage point of present retrospection. However, Hollywood genre pieces such as Hitchcock thrillers, historical epics, big budget musicals, or even John Wayne westerns somehow feel more familiar to contemporary audiences because they fit easily into a generic lineage of our current popular entertainment that constantly recycles the myths of the past. Every year sees a new batch of Hitchcock stylistic imitations, and the codes of the 50s Western are easily traced to modern science fiction and action films.

On the Waterfront, however, is more of an anomaly. It purports to be a "message" film, relying on journalistic research aimed at exposing corruption and heroizing the working man. Arguably, its own lineage goes back to the 1930’s Warner Brothers social problem films, e.g. Marked Woman, Angels with Dirty Faces, Dead End, I Cover the Waterfront. Yet for all its stylistic accomplishment and seriousness of social purpose, its moment of political insight is now dated.

For example, as with the Warner Brothers films, contemporary audiences have difficulty taking seriously films that expose urban problems but are devoid of characters who are not white. Only one Afro-American character in On the Waterfront has a couple of lines. However, it turns out that the one character was in fact a distortion of the historical situation. Schulberg, who organized an important writers' workshop in Watts during the turbulence in the 1960s, has written: "This is a movie of the '50's, reflecting a time when Blacks were not in the work gangs except in the lowest pissant jobs. I took a slight liberty in putting my friend, ex-fighter Don Blackman, in it. Incidentally, today's Jersey waterfront, under the Genovese family, has a white local and a black local, both run by racketeers, dangerous men."4 It is, of course, difficult for college students watching the film today to understand the class/racial aspects of what is going on in the film; they simply see what appears to be a few token Afro-American characters. Further, they have difficulties with the ethnicity of the white longshoremen, who have accents and class perspectives of recent European immigrants. Noel Ignatiev wrote How the Irish Became White, describing Irish competition with Afro Americans in the 19^th century for the lowest paying jobs prior to Irish assimilation into the mainstream "white" culture. On the Waterfront and the social conditions it describes suggests that assimilation was not necessarily finished in the 19^th century. Students need to think about why Pop Doyle is sending his daughter to a convent.

It should be apparent from the discussion so far, that to recover the innovative brilliance of On the Waterfront, one has to attend to it as a 1954 film. It can not be fully appreciated and understood without a context, which of course is the purpose of reviving an old film in an educational setting. In the remainder of this essay, I want to concentrate on two aspects of the film’s original context: its representation of social class and its visual codes. Both aspects sit at the heart of why it is difficult for young audiences today to understand why a professor would trot out this black and white film for educational consumption. The film’s representation of social class is confusing and unrecognizable to today’s predominantly middle class student and the film’s visual style has no resonance with their post-MTV sensibilities. I want to detail some of these problems with a view to finding a pedagogical strategy for enhancing the film’s considerable pleasure and recovering its historical importance.

The first and most salient negative aspect of the film for today’s general education student is its black and white photography. At my Midwestern, public university, a groan goes over the auditorium when any black and white title image appears. Students see black and white as a mark of technological inferiority, as if any director who would choose this technology is not really in the big leagues yet. They would see Ted Turner’s colorization efforts as a sensible solution to a technological failing. The instructor’s path is fairly clear here. You explain how composition and lighting are enhanced by black and white photography with many easy to locate illustrations in the film, e.g. the Christian allegory compositions of crucifixion, or the film noir lighting schemes when Terry Malloy is attacked in the alley. Then you illustrate further advancements in use of black and white with clips from Scorsese’s Raging Bull (particularly the scene which quotes from On the Waterfront) or an even newer film such as John Boorman’s The General. Finally, you remind them how often MTV and television advertising resort to black and white as a way to break through the clutter of television and capture their attention.

More difficult to explain to modern students is that Kazan and Schulberg’s decision to tell their story in black and white had more to do with generic codes of realism and social class than purely budgetary considerations. The now legendary story of Schulberg and Kazan’s trip to Hollywood to pitch the script to movie executives speaks directly to these aims (See Georgakas’s essay for a fuller account). Kazan convinced Schulberg to go west with him to pitch the script to Darryl Zanuck, chief of Twentieth Century Fox, based on the notion that Zanuck would see the project as another social problem film similar to the big success he had produced in 1939, Grapes of Wrath.

In the aesthetic codes of pre-Vietnam Hollywood, color was associated with big-budget fantasy film, e.g. the MGM Freed-unit musicals or the lavish bible epics. Black and white was associated with social realism for several reasons. It was cheaper, and with a wider exposure latitude, it allowed documentary photographers to enter unprepared locations and receive an acceptable image. Also an accumulation of films made in this manner, such as those of post-World War II Italian neo-realism, began to dictate an expectation that black and white was somehow more appropriate for social realism than color was. Thus, not surprisingly, Kazan and Schulberg specified in their meeting with Zanuck that the story, based on New Jersey labor union corruption, was to be told in black and white.

This presented immediate problems. Despite Zanuck's 1939 success with the black and white Grapes of Wrath, he was now excited by the possibilities of Cinemascope and had apparently made a commitment to make Fox’s entire slate of pictures in the wide-screen color process. This decision is of course in the context of Hollywood studios feeling the competition of television and feeling the need to differentiate their product from the still mostly-black and white medium of broadcast television. Zanuck felt On the Waterfront would not work in the Cinemascope process, and as Schulberg recalls the conversation:

(Kazan) recited his lexicon of the script’s virtues: "It’s unique–something different–it catches the whole spirit of the harbor–the way you caught the Okies in Grapes." (Zanuck replied) "But the Okies came across like American pioneers." The mark of a tycoon is to have answers ready for any challenge. "Who’s going to care about a lot of sweaty longshoremen?" (147)

Eight Oscars later, of course, the egg was upon Zanuck’s face, as it was apparent that if the story were told well, many people would care about "sweaty longshoremen," even if it was in flat black and white images. It is pure speculation to wonder what would have happened if a whim had struck Zanuck to the effect that he would only finance Kazan and Schulberg’s film if it were done in color Cinemascope. The speculative question is whether a 1954 audience would have embraced the film’s social realism as readily in color as they did in black and white. I think not. Visual codes and expectations have changed, however, and today’s audience has no problem with social realism in color, although maybe muted colors are more appropriate than vivid hues. Students today see black and white as "unrealistic."

This same issue of what is realistic and what is unrealistic is, of course, one of the key issues that must be discussed with students coming to On the Waterfront for the first time. On the one hand the film presents realistic dialogue, a well researched depiction of working class life, authentic location photography, and drama taken from newspaper articles. But then the film also presents the larger than life star mythology of Marlon Brando, the schmaltzy romantic plot, Leonard Bernstein’s intrusive musical score, and violent melodrama. Perhaps examining the cinematography of the film is the ideal playing field for deconstructing these notions of "realism."

Boris Kaufman frequently uses long shot, deep focus photography that situates the workmen versus the harbor. Students need to be encouraged to examine the relationship of the symbolic compositional schemes that Kaufman uses versus the conventions of social realism. For example, in the first introduction of Johnny Friendly and his gang, the mobsters come from low in the frame towards the camera, but still dominated by the large freighter in the background and the harbor. The compositional patterns suggest that the evil in the harbor is containable by the larger system and social structures. The drama of the narrative works out the same dynamics of the spatial representations only through temporal relationships. An easy example is the use of low angle versus high angle shots of the various characters. Terry Malloy is never shot against an open sky until he makes the decision to challenge Johnny Friendly. He then is effectively joined to the earlier compositions which arrange Father Barry against the sky whenever he attempts to inspire workers to make spiritual choices.

The world of the mobsters in the film is depicted with high contrast, low key photography quite reminiscent of film noir and gangster films. The garish lighting in the back alley when Terry discovers his murdered brother effectively expresses the good/evil polarity of Terry’s situation at that point in the narrative. The more low contrast, high key lighting of the dockside confrontations suggests the complexity and ambiguity of the workers’ situation with regard to work and organized labor.

Kaufman worked extensively in documentary photography and his brother was Dziga Vertov. If students have seen Eisenstein’s Potemkin, they should be encouraged to look at some of the harbor action compositions for how Kaufman arranges vectors and compositions to enhance the dynamics of the conflict inherent in the story. It is strikingly reminiscent of the scene in Potemkin when the local population mourns the death of the sailor Vakulinchuk.

On the Waterfront does foreground techniques and visual codes foreign to contemporary viewers. However, interrogating these aesthetic choices should be rewarding and interesting to students. Their difference from today’s codes should help us understand contemporary film better and have more appreciation for the artistry of the past.

To return for a moment to Zanuck’s rejection of the On the Waterfront script. This much-told tale also speaks to Hollywood’s anxiety about representations of social class in stories dealing with labor unions. Not to be discounted is the fact that Zanuck was having his own problems with Hollywood trade unions during this time. Indeed, Jon Lewis argues that unions were anathema to moguls such as Zanuck: "The unions ushered in a new way of doing business that at once professionalized labor relations and rendered obsolete the personal, entrepreneurial, and paternalistic style that characterized management of virtually all the studios" (24). It might be a bit of a stretch to suggest that Johnny Friendly standing alone and abandoned as labor marches by him is an allegorical representation of a Hollywood mogul watching his sovereignty dissolve in the 1950s, but the parallel is interesting. On the Waterfront only gets made when an independent producer, Sam Spiegel, takes on the project with some financing from Columbia.

The film is very cautious about offering prescriptive political solutions to the exploitation of labor. In fact, the most vivid exploitation seems to be coming from the working class itself, as Johnny Friendly has come up through the ranks. One of the leftist objections to the film over the years has been that by foregrounding a corrupt labor union infested by racketeers at a time when few Hollywood films took organized labor as a subject, that the film in effect condemns labor unions as a solution to the working man’s exploitation. Indeed, the resolution of the film turns on Terry Malloy’s ability to take a beating and go on working, rather than any demonstration that effective alternative leadership will replace Johnny Friendly.

An argument can easily be made that the film succeeds not so much on its depiction of "sweaty longshoremen," who are in fact background material, but rather on Marlon Brando’s sexual charisma, his chemistry with Eve Marie Saint, or even the violent, melodramatic aspects of the drama. Still, the film originated as a Pulitzer Prize winning expose of union corruption by Malcom Johnson. However, what attracted Kazan and Schulberg was not so much the opportunity to do a documentary style exposition of the longshoreman’s plight, but rather the chance to focus dramatically on the more universal theme of individuals willing to risk their lives to tell the truth about corruption and exploitation of workers. In interviews Kazan talks about an individual named Anthony de Vincenzo; Schulberg says there were numerous individuals upon which Terry Malloy was modeled. However, Schulberg and Kazan were in enough agreement on the need for entertainment value, that the biggest fabrication they made to the mostly true story of the "insurgents" and the real life priest, John Corridan, was the extensive love story between Edie Doyle and Terry. This attraction is effectively the catalyst in Terry’s decision to "rat" on the mob (Terry’s brother is murdered mostly for his inability to keep Terry away from "the Doyle girl").

If the imposition of the tender love story smacks a bit of Hollywood commercialism, it is still buttressed by an unusually sensitive depiction of working class people for 1950s Hollywood. (or any other period for that matter) Schulberg has a journalistic background, but he essentially did ethnographic research in the longshoreman community in west Manhattan. Over a period of three years he did his best to conceal his Dartmouth education and upbringing as a son of a Paramount studio executive so that he could hang out in waterfront bars and absorb the idioms and perspectives of the colorful longshoremen. He used his lifelong affinity for boxing as a way to get longshoremen to warm up to him even as he was an outsider to their community. His effort and a highly sensitive ear paid off in entirely convincing dialogue. Although I call his efforts ethnographic, Schulberg had no pretensions about journalistic or ethographic objectivity. During the union struggles which coincided with the research, he wrote a number of exposes for New York publications detailing what was going on with the murder and intimidation of the longshoremen. One of his pieces was credited with convincing Tony de Vincenzo to join the "insurgents."

Schulberg was also active in the recruiting of extras even to the point of getting a longshoreman to coach Brando on the proper New Jersey accent for Terry Malloy. Kazan also spent considerable time in the longshoremen’s milieu being introduced to Schulberg’s contacts. Kazan claims he was threatened during the shooting of the film to the point that he hired a body guard to be with him at all times.5

If Schulberg and Kazan’s first priority was to make an exciting, successful commercial feature film, that they actually took time to mingle with and get to know their working class subjects was rare in 1954 and probably rare today as well, John Sayles aside. Many theorists such as Marshall McLuhan have expressed the idealistic hope that film would become an important vehicle for viewers around the world to better understand cultural and class differences. The notion is that if film can introduce strangers to each other, then aggression and exploitation becomes a less preferred option for cross-cultural interaction. From this standpoint, we might again consider the reception situation of modern college students from the middle and upper middle classes viewing a film replete with representations of working people in 1950s America. Does the film encourage cross cultural understanding and respect fifty years later?

A starting point for such a consideration might be the same well written, realistic dialogue just discussed. When Karl Malden’s Father Barry delivers a eulogy in the hold of a freighter following Kayo Dugan’s murder, Schulberg used actual phrases from sermons delivered by the real life model, Reverend John Corridan. When Terry Malloy finds his murdered brother hanging by a hook in an alley, he says "I’ll take it out on their skulls!" again from a line Schulberg heard from a waterfront acquaintance. The considerable power of On the Waterfront’s dialogue is dependent on Schulberg’s ear for capturing the color and use of idiom of the longshoremen. However, appreciating Schulberg’s artistry depends on a sensitivity and curiosity about cross cultural or class difference. Students today see movies with working class dialogue derived from B-movies, such as Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, or rap idiom based drugs-in-ghetto films such as Boyz in the Hood. Further, television’s omni-presence may be diluting regional and class-based accents and vernacular to the point that the dialogue in On the Waterfront sounds foreign to modern ears. Contemporary students need to be prepared to listen to the dialogue as valuable tool for understanding an earlier America where language was used in a highly expressive fashion.

On the Waterfront proceeds from an era when social realist filmmakers felt that if they put the mirror up to society and showed its injustice, that a viewing public would demand needed change. This view was expressed in Italian neo-realism of the late 1940s, the 1950s Angry Young Men in Britain, as well as in the technological advances that led to Direct Cinema and Cinema Verite in the late 1950s. The social positivism of these movements seems an alien concept to cynical, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate audiences. Contemporary student audiences are inclined to see the mirror held up to society as not asking for any response on their part. Students I show Harlan County U.S.A. to wonder why the striking miners don’t leave the economically deprived area and get a job at Walmart. When they see Roger and Me they agree that General Motors is mercenary and exploitative, but they are very comfortable making fun of the working class characters who they see as too stupid to leave Flint. Most college students do not pursue education out of love of learning; they pursue education to get the job that ensures that they are never as vulnerable as the working class characters on display in these films. Further, the concept of being geographically and relationally bound is foreign to students today. They take geographic mobility as inalienable right.

Terry Malloy’s "You know what my philosophy is? Do it to him before he does it to you." resonates powerfully with today’s college age audience. Perhaps that also resonated in 1954, but then it was only nine years following the ideology of self sacrifice for the good of the whole that was World War II and twenty years after the Great Depression. After Vietnam, Watergate, and the corporate greed of the last decades, sadly Edie and Father Barry’s speeches about social conscience and responsibility towards your fellow man seem naively idealistic and antiquated, at least to today's college student. That the philosophy seems to be coming from stalwarts of the Catholic church certainly does not help the matter with mass attendance at an all time low in this country.

The treatment of secular moral authority in On the Waterfront is no less dated than religious authority, as demonstrated by the representation of the Crime Commission investigators. The two government men who approach Terry about testifying seem one hundred per cent sincere and sure of the government’s ability to provide solutions to the labor corruption. They even seem rather good humored about Terry’s surly treatment of them, as if they are already convinced that he will come around and do the right thing. The government functionaries at the public testimony spout platitudes about how things will improve on the waterfront by simply exposing the corruption. However, there is no evidence that any mechanism is in place to follow through on the revelations. It is difficult to imagine a film in the era of JFK and The X Files presenting government investigators so straightforwardly without a trace of irony or conspiracy. Films today such as Dragnet, Pleasantville, Back to the Future, or even The Atomic Café define a cultural cynicism about the moral authority of institutions in the 1950s that shapes and reflects contemporary response to On the Waterfront. If we are nostalgic about the era, it is for James Dean antiheroes and Marilyn Monroe sex symbols, not for paternalistic authority figures like Sergeant Joe Friday.

If there is a legacy of 1950s social realism in the contemporary films that make it to suburban malls, it is not a strong one. Film audiences today demand feel good endings with affirmative characters who by the end transcend their social class, e.g. Erin Brockovitch. If the audience is made aware of a class-based inequity, then they want to know what the positive resolution is before they leave the theater. The 1950s social realist notion that an audience should leave uncomfortable or even angry is a bygone notion attached to the concept of self sacrifice for a greater common good. Some of the success of Hoop Dreams is attributable to the fact that even though we see a cinema verite depiction of a family dealing with poverty and drug abuse, by the end we know those two teenagers have gotten into colleges, a gauge for their success as athletes, for better or worse.

Another barrier contemporary audiences feel in the reception of On the Waterfront today is its depiction of gender. Initially, Eva Marie Saint’s Edie Doyle seems a strong female role model character. She’s gone to college. She demands action when her father and neighbors react passively to her brother’s murder, as if her education has given her the power to speak out. She seems forceful and brave in confronting Terry’s moral ambivalence and asking him to respond. However the depiction soon takes a detour towards more traditional rendition of females in violent, action sagas. Once Terry’s brother is murdered, Edie begins to argue that the situation is hopeless, that she and Terry can only run away from the problem. The groans in the college auditorium are particularly loud during the scene where she locks the door attempting to keep Terry away. Brando plays the scene with raging testosterone and breaks down the symbolic door. To contemporary audiences sensitive about issues such as date rape, Terry kissing Edie, initially against her will, makes many uncomfortable, whether Brando previously seemed tender and gentle when he was trying on her white glove or not. Edie’s final disempowering is that she sits ineffectively on the sidelines during the climatic dockside confrontations. Brando's sexuality is used to recuperate her from her social activist position to a traditional, docile female role. Not only does Terry affirm macho physical violence as a solution to the problems of the longshoremen, but Pop Doyle, Edie’s father, regains his earlier compromised potency by being the worker who shoves Johnny Friendly into the water. Terry and her dad trudge into work while Edie smiles, standing next to the priest; there is nothing ambiguous about the resolution of this gender dilemma, as students are quick to point out

Thus On the Waterfront flirts with having a feminist character, but ultimately ends up reinforcing the church, the family, and traditional gender roles. Not surprisingly, some cultural studies critics have posed the film as a fantasy vehicle for conformity-conscious 1950s America. Peter Biskind has argued that the film is about fantasies of breaking free of social control, but that it presents Brando, as many other films do, as a rebel in need of a beating. Once the anti-hero's impulses are tamed by the symbolic beating, then: "The hero who betrayed his friends, as Terry Malloy does in On the Waterfront …could sit down at the table with Ozzie and Harriet and be assured a piece of the pie" (165-166).

Biskind approaches On the Waterfront as a piece of popular culture. One can understand Schulberg's objection that this trivializes a narrative that emerged from real life heroes who risked their lives for a higher standard of living. However, when Brando delivers something with the mythic resonance of "I could have been a contender…" then considerations of how the film relates to Schulberg's journalistic research seem to have gone out the window. It is important to consider On the Waterfront from the perspective of how it effectively manages the desires and aspirations of post-World War II American society, it spoke to many people for many reasons. Biskind’s analysis, however, is less insightful when it, like many others, tries to pose the film as an allegory of the HUAC investigation and McCarthyism. He writes: "On the Waterfront was a weapon of the witch-hunt, a blow struck in the ideological and artistic battle between those who talked and those who didn’t" (170).

He seems to have forgotten the popular culture status he had earlier claimed for the film. . No general audience in 1954 or in the present would see a connection between Terry Malloy and the HUAC testifiers, unless coached to by an over zealous film professor. Kazan has fostered this reading over the years by talking about how he empathized with Terry Malloy, such as in his Production Notebook at the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives as well as his autobiography.6 But reading the film as an allegory of Kazan’s HUAC testimony is a great example of the perils of the auteur theory, when artists, particularly those embroiled in political controversy, are allowed to dictate the interpretation of their work.

Still, the spectacle of a divided Hollywood at the 1999 Oscar ceremony when Elia Kazan was presented a lifetime achievement award must have confused many viewers not familiar with the blacklist period of history. The past can be a foreign country, and many students wanted an explanation of why certain Hollywood luminaries were applauding while others sat on their hands. But any film teacher who would privilege the allegory of McCarthyism in the interpretation of On the Waterfront would be doing a disservice to the power of the film. If anything, Kazan and Schulberg’s preoccupation with informing, or "ratting", in the narrative of On the Waterfront may be overdone to a contemporary audience whose first response to Terry’s final actions are that he is a "whistle blower" rather than a "stool pigeon." Biskind again is insightful here in reminding us how 1950s audiences had more European ethnicity than today’s. Irish traditions about informing during the British colonial period or the Sicilian/Italian code of "omerta" would figure into the 1954 reception, yet seem baseless today (170). We live in a society where European ethnicity is progressively being erased, and students have difficulty identifying the traditions to which On the Waterfront alludes.

An anecdote may quickly illustrate the reception problems I have been trying to outline. Recently at the very progressive, private Oberlin college, the student film society announced that it was: "bringing On the Waterfront in honor of Parents' Weekend, as this is a film that spoke to our parents' generation, and also tends to be shown in religion classes at all-girls' Catholic high school."7 The student paper review is replete with inaccuracies about how the film was controversial in its day because of Kazan's testimony at HUAC and how Terry Malloy's standing up for justice in the film was: "a trait not entirely valued by 1950s materialistic society--whose members, for the most part, had been swept away by commercial culture and in the process, tended to push aside issues of social welfare." However Brando's performance as "the beefy boy with a heart of gold" is lauded, as are "beautiful shots of Hoboken when the waterfront still existed." I am sure the review was written quickly and haphazardly, but it still illustrates a condescending, postmodern attitude that history has collapsed and is not much worth looking into with any depth.

Such cultural amnesia, however, is precisely why we use 45-year old films as vehicles for understanding the culture and class politics of the American past. On the Waterfront reflects both a different set of social codes as well as a different set of visual codes when a modern audience encounters this "classic." Yet it is difficult to think of a more essential text for opening up the aesthetic and social considerations important to 1950s America, both in its failings and in its strengths. Ultimately, we understand more about our own codes by understanding those of the past, which is why it will continue to remain on my film syllabus. If I continue to feel disquieted and uncomfortable about Terry's trudge into the maw at the end, well, that is a pleasure of the text. I like movies that make me think and feel.

Anderson, Lindsay. "The Last Sequence of On the Waterfront." Sight and Sound (24:3, 1955), 127-130.

Baer, William, Elia Kazan: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

Biskind, Peter, Seeing is Believing. New York: Pantheon, 1983.

Brando, Marlon. Songs My Mother Taught Me. New York: Random House, 1994.

Hey, Kenneth. "Ambivalence as a Theme in On the Waterfront (1954): An Interdisciplinary Approach to Film Study." In Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context. Ed. Peter C. Rollins. Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1983.

Lewis, Jon. "’We Do Not Ask You to Condone This’: How the Blacklist Saved Hollywood." Cinema Journal 39.2 (Winter 2000), 3-30.

Schulberg, Budd. On the Waterfront: A Screenplay. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1980.

Young, Jeff. Kazan: The Master Director Discusses His Films. New York: Newmarket Press, 1999.

1 William Baer, ed. Elia Kazan: Interviews. (University Press of Mississippi: 2000), p. 176.
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² In the Michel Ciment interview, Kazan commented: "I knew the waterfront in Hoboken intimately. I spent months there. Schulberg spent a year there. There was an election, after the film was made, in which the 'good' side, our side, lost by something like a hundred votes, out of two thousand--a very samll margin. The waterfront has never got any better, it's the same now, just the same." Baer, ibid, p. 161.
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³ Letter to Joanna Rapf, September 7, 2000.
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⁴ Rapf, ibid.
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⁵ In Songs My Mother Taught Me Brando writes: "The irony of all this was that he had to get permission from the Mafia to shoot there. When they invited (Kazan) to lunch, he dragged me along, and I didn’t know until afterward that the gentleman we had lunch with was in fact the head of the Jersey waterfront" (195). Schulberg commented to Joanna Rapf that this story was inaccurate and that "Marlon may be our greatest actor but he is not exactly a Pulitzer Prize reporter."
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⁶ In an interview with Jeff Young, Kazan said: "When people said there are some parallels to what I had done, I couldn’t and wouldn’t deny it. It does have some parallels. But I wasn’t concerned with them nor did I play on them. They were not my reason for making the film. I had wanted to do a picture about the waterfront long before any of the HUAC business came up" (118).
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⁷ Sabrina Rahman. "Once Controversial On the Waterfront Screens Saturday." The Oberlin Review. (November 3, 2000), 12.
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