I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  The center of the dramatic structure, the priest’s speech over Dugan’s body in the hold, is the poorest scene of the film. The priest speaks with such facility that the ideological mechanics become distressingly obvious, and the re-enactment of the stoning of saints is an embarrassing contrivance, an effort to achieve a supremely powerful effect by recall rather than creation. The scene appeals not only to Catholic interest but to what we have come to recognize as Catholic taste as well. And although the concept of crucifixion in the film is scarcely the Catholic Church’s concept, in using the figure of the priest the artists acquire a certain amount of unearned increment by making the film more acceptable to Catholics. When Terry tells the priest to go to hell, the patent intention is to shock the religious audience, and, of course, to cue us all: we know that such sacrilege is possible only for one who will shortly be redeemed.

  On the theatrical level, most of the Christian symbolism functions well in the film. The artists have not further debased it; compared to what we are accustomed to in Hollywood pictures, they have given it considerable dignity. But theatricality can too easily be confused with dramatic strength and Christian mythology provides an all too convenient source of theatrical devices — the jacket, for example, that passes from one crucified figure to another. Such devices do not give meaning, they give only dramatic effect, the look of meaning.

  The director, Elia Kazan, is undoubtedly a master of what is generally regarded as “good theater”: all those movements, contrasts, and arrangements which have been developed to give inferior material the look of drama. “Good theater” is an elaborate set of techniques for throwing dust in the eyes of the audience, dust, which to many theater-trained minds, is pure gold. When Kazan has real dramatic material in On the Waterfront, his staging is simple and he lets the actors’ faces and voices do the work; but when the material is poor or unrealized, he camouflages with “effective staging” — the theater term for what is really high pressure salesmanship. Your theater instinct tells you that these effects are supposed to do something for you, but you may be too aware of the manipulation to feel anything but admiration (or resentment) for the director’s “know-how.”

  The advantages of Kazan’s direction are in his fine eye for living detail (for example, in Terry’s first interchange with the men from the crime commission); the disadvantages are that the best things are often overpowered by the emphasis given to the worst. Rod Steiger’s fine performance as the brother stays within its own framework, while Malden’s priest is so overburdened with reference and effect that it disintegrates. Though this priest is not cut from the same cloth as Paramount’s priests, at times (and he has his coy moments) he adopts a similar protective coloration. The musical score is excellent; then at a crucial moment it stops, and the silence compels awareness of the music. There are a few places where Kazan’s dexterity fails completely: moving the union men around as a herd is too “staged” to be convincing. And even “good theater” doesn’t allow for elements that are tossed in without being thought out (the ship owner, an oddly ambiguous abstraction, possibly cartooned in obeisance to the labor-union audience) or tossed in without being felt (the complacent, smiling faces of the priest and the girl at the end — converted, by a deficiency of artistic sensibility, into pure plaster). Many weaknesses go back to the script, of course (for example, the failure to show the reasons For the union men’s loyalty to the boss), but Kazan, by trying to make assets out of liabilities, forces consideration of his responsibility.

  If one feels bound to examine the flaws and facilities of On the Waterfront it is because, intermittently, and especially in Brando’s scenes with the girl in the saloon and with his brother in the cab, the film is great. Brando’s performance is the finest we have had in American films since Vivien Leigh’s Blanche DuBois. Marlon Brando has that ability shared by most great actors: he can convey the multiple and paradoxical meanings in a character.

  Brando makes contact with previously untapped areas in American social and psychological experience. If one had doubts about the authenticity of Terry’s character, audience manifestations would confirm its truth. Brando’s inarticulate wise guy attracts a startling number of its kind; there they are in the theater, gratified by their image, shouting at the screen and guffawing at Brando. Their derision is just like Terry’s derisive compliments to the girl; they, too, are afraid to expose their vulnerability. They are exhibitionistic in their excitement when Terry gestures and voices disbelief in social values: it is not Terry as a candidate for redemption who excites them, but Terry the tough. They have a truer sense of Terry and themselves than those who conceived the film.

  The writer and director placed this imaginatively compelling figure in a structure which, while theatrically fairly sound, is not the dramatic complement the figure deserves. Terry has his own kind of consciousness; he is too compelling to act out their consciousness and to fit the social role they assign him. Terry is credible until he becomes a social hero. Does moral awakening for a Terry mean that he acquires the ability to change the external situation, or does it mean simply an intensification and a broadening of his alienation? We know that movie heroes can always conquer evil, but in the early sequences we didn’t know that Terry was going to be turned into this kind of “regular” hero. The other protagonists have been oversimplified until they seem to be mere symbols rather than human beings who might have some symbolic meaning. As dramatic characters they lack dimensions, as symbolic representations of the waterfront struggle they are inadequate. Our social problems are much too complex to be dramatically rendered in a Christian parable. The artists who made the film have a remarkable negative similarity: they do not risk alienation from the mass audience. And they do not face up to the imaginative task — nor to the social risk — of creating fresh symbols. Have they earned the right to show their hero risking his life in order to save his soul?

  The myth of the creation of a saint (or, indeed, a multiplicity of saints) which cripples the dramatic development of Terry’s character, does an even more obvious disservice to the social questions the film raises. The myth structure forces a superficial answer to questions for which no one has a satisfactory answer. The honest union posited at the end is an abstraction, which could not even be dramatically posited if the film had not already abstracted the longshore local it treats from the total picture of waterfront unionism and American business. An item in Time for September 27, 1954, is to the point:

  John Dwyer, a brawny hiring boss on the brawling New York City docks (and a prototype of Marlon Brando’s movie role in On the Waterfront), quit his $10,000-a-year job last year to fight the racket-ridden International Longshoremen’s Association. As vice president of the A.F.L.’s new rival dock union, he won thousands of dock-wallopers away from the I.L.A. But last month the I.L.A. won a Labor Relations Board election (by a scant 263 votes out of 18,551), and thereby held on to control of waterfront jobs.

  The A.F.L. brasshats, retreating from their attempt to reform the docks, cut their organizing losses (about $1,000,000), ended their all-out campaign and fired John Dwyer. When Dwyer protested, they ignored his letters and hung up on phone calls. Last week Dwyer bitterly told his men to “forget about the A.F.L. and go back to the I.L.A.” Brusquely, the I.L.A. snubbed Dwyer and said A.F.L. rank-and-filers could come back only if they paid up back dues. For a happy ending dockers could go to the movies.

  This kind of data suggests why alienation is such a powerful theme in our art: if, for the individual, efforts to alter a situation end in defeat, and adjustment (with decency) is impossible, alienation may be all that’s left. Would Terry seem so compelling if his behavior and attitudes did not express a profound mass cynicism and a social truth? More goes into his alienation than the activities of a John Friendly, and his character is powerful because it suggests much more — the desire of adolescents to find an acceptable ethic, quasi-homosexual elements in this ethic, adolescent hostility toward adult compromises, the identification
with an antisocial code, the intensity of aspirations. Terry’s scene with his brother in the cab is drama because these accumulated elements explode. These elements and many more derive, not merely from a corrupt union, but from the dislocation of youth in our society, and ultimately, if one takes a pessimistic view, they derive from the human condition. The betrayal experienced by the boy who kills the pigeons is not altogether mistaken. With On the Waterfront alienation reaches the widest audience at the level of the raw unconscious hero who suggests the unconscious alienation experienced at all social levels. The artists who wanted to affect everybody just about did.

  Artists who aim at nobility may achieve something pretentious and overscaled, but their aim tells us something about the feeling and tone of American life that is not wholly to be deprecated. Abroad, it is deprecated, and the excesses of On the Waterfront gave European critics a gloating edge of triumph. Is it perhaps evidence of cultural condescension that the festival committees which had passed over From Here to Eternity and On the Waterfront honored Marty, a thin, mechanical piece of sentimental realism — as if to say, “Stick to little things, you Americans, when you try to do something bigger, you expose your dreadful vulgarity.”

  On the Waterfront came as a public shock in 1954 because Hollywood films have stayed away from the real America, just as, while feeding Christians to the lions, they have stayed away from the real Rome. According to Harper’s, “The things movies ‘say’ are so much better stated through indirect suggestion, and Hollywood has developed so many techniques of skillful evasion, that the burden of censorship and the pressure groups has always been more apparent than real. Art thrives on limitations.” One wonders if Harper’s goes to movies often enough to see Hollywood’s “techniques of skillful evasion” in operation. If there is anything “skillful” in our films, it is merely in product differentiation — in making each new film just like the others that have sold, yet with some little difference in casting or locale or extra costliness that can give it special appeal. Within the temples of The Egyptian you can see the shape of the lowest theater, mouldy in motive and manner. When you hear the whore of Babylon ask the hero for “the greatest gift any man can give a woman — his innocence — that he can give only once” you know that those responsible for the film have long since surrendered their greatest gift. A bad film can be a good joke, as Duel in the Sun once so delightfully demonstrated; but Valley of the Kings, Garden of Evil, The High and the Mighty are not even very good jokes. Despite its defects, and they are major, On the Waterfront provides an imaginative experience. If one regrets that the artists, having created an authentic image of alienation, failed to take that image seriously enough, one remembers also that most films provide no experience at all.

  Romance

  The alienated hero acquires a new dimension in East of Eden: James Dean’s Cal, even more inarticulate and animalistic than Terry, is a romantic figure, decorated with all sorts of charming gaucheries, and set, anachronistically, in a violent reverie of pre–World War I youth. At one level he’s the All-American boy (and the reverse of the usual image of the artist as a youth): he’s not too good at school, he’s sexually active, he’s not interested in politics but has a childlike responsiveness to parades, he doesn’t care about words or ideas. Yet this lack of intellectual tendencies is projected as evidence of sensitivity and purity of feeling; the strangled speech, the confused efforts at gesture, as poetry. This is a new image in American films: the young boy as beautiful, disturbed animal, so full of love he’s defenseless. Maybe his father doesn’t love him, but the camera does, and we’re supposed to; we’re thrust into upsetting angles, caught in infatuated close-ups, and prodded, “Look at all that beautiful desperation.”

  The film is overpowering: it’s like seeing a series of teasers — violent moments and highly charged scenes without structural coherence (one begins to wonder if the teaser is Kazan’s special genre?). When Cain strikes Abel, the sound track amplifies the blow as if worlds were colliding; a short heavy dose of expressionism may be followed by a pastoral romp or an elaborate bit of Americana; an actor may suddenly assume a psychotic stance, another actor shatter a train window with his head. With so much going on, one might forget to ask why. The explanation provided (Cal wants his father to love him) is small reason for the grotesque melodramatic flux. But from a director’s point of view, success can be seen as effectiveness, failure as dullness — and East of Eden isn’t dull.

  If, after the film, the air outside the theater seems especially clean and fresh, it is not only from relief at escaping the cracker-barrel humanism, it’s the restorative power of normal, uncoerced perspective: it’s a little like coming out of a loony bin. A boy’s agonies should not be dwelt on so lovingly: being misunderstood may easily become the new and glamorous lyricism. With East of Eden, Hollywood has caught up with the main line of American avant-garde cinema — those embarrassingly autoerotic twelve-minute masterpieces in which rejected, inexplicable, and ambiguous figures are photographed in tortured chiaroscuro, films which exude symbolism as if modern man were going to find himself by chasing the shadow of an alter ego in a dark alley. When alienation is exploited for erotic gratification, film catches up with the cult realities of city parks and Turkish baths; clear meanings or definite values would be too grossly explicit — a vulgar intrusion on the Technicolor night of the soul.

  The romance of human desperation is ravishing for those who wish to identify with the hero’s amoral victory: everything he does is forgivable, his crimes are not crimes at all, because he was so terribly misunderstood. (And who in the audience, what creature that ever lived, felt he was loved enough?) This is the victory that we used to think of as a child’s fantasy: now it is morality for nursery school and theater alike. The concept of Terry was a little behind the times: he was posited as heroic because he acted for the social good. Cal is the hero simply and completely because of his need, and his frenzied behavior, the “bad” things that he does, establish him as a hero by demonstrating his need. (When Peter Lorre as M said he couldn’t help what he did, who would have thought him heroic? We have come a slippery distance.) This is a complete negation of previous conceptions of heroism: the hero is not responsible for his actions — the crazy, mixed-up kid becomes a romantic hero by being treated on an infantile level. And the climax of the film is not the boy’s growing up beyond this need or transferring it to more suitable objects, but simply the satisfaction of an infantile fantasy: he displaces his brother and is at last accepted by his father.

  In theater and film, the mixed-up kid has evolved from the depression hero, but the explanation from the thirties (poverty did this) no longer works, and the refinement of it in On the Waterfront (corruption did this) didn’t work. It gives way in East of Eden to something even more facile and fashionable: the psychiatric explanation (lack of love did this). Although it’s rather bizarre to place this hyped-up modern type in the setting of a historical novel, the reminiscent haze has some advantages: the basic incoherence of motive would probably be even more apparent in a modern setting. Cal’s poetry of movement would be odd indeed if he were leaping and careening in the streets of 1955.

  The type of heroism entrenched in most older and routine films is based on the obscenity: “right makes might and might makes right.” (The hero can back up his moral and ethical edge on the villain with stronger fists.) And an absurd corollary is attached: the girl loves the man who fights for the right. East of Eden introduces a rather dismaying new formula: need for love makes right, and the girl loves the boy who most needs to be loved.

  Films can, and most of them do, reduce all the deprivations and coercions, desires and hopes of social and individual experience, to the simple formula of needing love. In The Young at Heart, the bitter depression hero once played by John Garfield is brought up to date: the young composer (Frank Sinatra) is simply an oddball, bitter because he is an orphan and the world has never made a place for him. But Doris Day accepts him and when he fee
ls all warm and cozy in her middle-class family, his bitterness melts. (Most artists are, of course, bitter against precisely the middle-class coziness that Doris Day and her family represent.) In a more sophisticated version, we get Gloria Grahame in The Cobweb: she is all fixed-up and able to save her marriage (and square the Production Code) once she knows her husband really needs her. (Lauren Bacall gives her no real competition: she has been analyzed — she is mature and doesn’t need anybody.) The convenient Hollywood explanation for alienation — for failure to integrate in the economy, for hostility to authority and society — is, then, lack of love and acceptance. You’re bland and happy when you’re loved, and if you’re unhappy, it’s not really your fault, you just haven’t been loved. This is the language of the jukebox, and when Freud is reduced to this level, psychoanalysis becomes the language of idiocy. (In a few years, films will probably reflect the next national swing: so I got love, now what?)

  Snow Jobs in Sunshine Land

  Nobody is satisfied with Hollywood’s approach to delinquency, but who has a better one? The psychiatrically-oriented social workers and teachers are advised that they will be included in the delinquent’s hostility to authority and that they must get through to the boy. But is the boy mistaken in feeling that they are trying to give him a snow job and that they are part of the apparatus of deadly adjustment to what he is reacting against? Blackboard Jungle says that the boy is mistaken, and though in many ways a good film, like The Wild One it’s a snow job. The Wild One had taken a news story as the basis for a nightmare image: the leather-jacketed pack of motorcyclists take over a town; their emblem is a death’s head and crossed pistons and rods, and Brando is their leader, Lee Marvin his rival. But the movie seemed to be frightened of its subject matter and reduced it as quickly as possible to the trivial meaninglessness of misunderstood boy meets understanding girl; the audience could only savor the potentialities. Blackboard Jungle lifts a group of mixed-up kids from the headlines and tries to devise a dramatic structure for them out of the social problem drama. Delinquency is treated as a problem with a definite solution: the separation of the salvageable from the hopeless, and the drama is in the teacher’s effort to reach the salvageable. (Like the newspapers, both films avoid discussion of why the boys form their own organizations, with rigid authority, strict codes, and leaders.) Although the script of Blackboard Jungle is sane and intelligible, the thematic resolution (like the end of The Wild One) is an uneasy dodge—not because it isn’t well worked out, but because the film draws its impact from a situation that can’t be so easily worked out. It’s hard to believe in the good teacher’s idealism; audiences audibly assent to the cynical cowardice of the other teachers — even though it’s rather overdone. Somehow it’s no surprise when we excavate the short story on which the rather shoddy novel was based to find that in the original version, “To Break the Wall,” the teacher did not break through. This, like Dwyer’s “forget about the A.F.L. and go back to the I.L.A.,” has the ring of truth — what Harper’s might call “decadence.”