Brando's Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work

by Susan L. Mizruchi

  The House of Representatives investigations of Communism in the entertainment industry had actually begun in the late 1930s, but they were suspended during World War II due to the US alliance with the Soviet Union. The investigations gained steam again during the buildup to the Cold War. By the time Kazan appeared before the committee in the late winter and spring of 1952, all eight of the actors, writers, and directors whose names he gave the committee had been exposed; his testimony was to serve as further proof. It was an illustrious group, including Morris Carnovsky, Clifford Odets, and Paula Strasberg. While Kazan did some of what would be considered his most important work after testifying against his eight former colleagues, his life and career never recovered from it. He became a pariah in an embattled Hollywood, where the HUAC investigation caused irreparable suffering, even suicide. Kazan was not the only Hollywood luminary to cooperate with the committee, but he became a symbol of shameful opportunism in one of the community’s gravest episodes, for two reasons. The first was Kazan’s relatively quick capitulation to the committee’s demands: He was called to testify as a “friendly witness” and had agreed to talk well before appearing on April 10, 1952. Others took longer to capitulate, some serving jail time in the process. The second reason for Kazan’s pariah status was the sanctimonious self-defense he published in the New York Times (April 12, 1952), rationalizing his testimony as an honest effort to “protect” his country from “a dangerous and alien conspiracy” and affirming the value of “free speech.”64 This was only the beginning. Kazan would spend the rest of his life defending his actions.

  Because Brando was known as a fierce individualist and had major box-office appeal, he was relatively protected from the HUAC investigations.65 He would soon have more firsthand experience with Hollywood blacklisting, though, pulling strings on behalf of his sister Jocelyn, a victim of HUAC, and later having his own films boycotted after he signed petitions against lynching in the South.66 Like everyone in the entertainment industry in this era, he knew people whose lives had been destroyed by HUAC. That, and his extraordinary level of idealism, ensured that he would take Kazan’s betrayal very seriously. A friend who was with Brando in Paris when news of Kazan’s testimony became public remembers his anguish. “He is the best director around,” Brando lamented, “and I’ll never be able to work with him again.”67 The actor eventually accepted the extensive personal rationales he was given and agreed to take the role of Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront. Brando later quipped that his decision was sealed by a contract clause negotiated with producer Sam Spiegel, allowing him to end work early when he had psychiatrist appointments in Manhattan. Around this period, Brando had begun to see Dr. Bela Mittelmann, a therapist recommended by Kazan, partly to deal with a host of problems from childhood. These included the distrust of women generated by his mother’s unreliability that made it impossible for him to be in a committed relationship, and the rage toward his father that made him hostile toward authority figures. But Brando was also extremely ambitious; he recognized the potential of the script and knew what he and Kazan together could make of it.

  Still, many years later, Brando’s position on Kazan’s testimony remained unequivocal: He greatly admired the man’s talent but deplored his actions. In his letter of February 24, 1999, responding to a request that he participate or allow his films to be shown in a segment of the Academy Awards ceremony honoring Kazan, Brando lamented that Kazan had never apologized publicly for the injury and suffering caused by his HUAC testimony. Citing the destructive impact of the HUAC investigations in Hollywood overall, and the deleterious effect on the career of his sister Jocelyn in particular, Brando hoped that perhaps “the years will have allowed [Kazan] to soften his position on these matters” and suggested that, “on the occasion where his name is to be celebrated and honored, that he make a clear acknowledgment of regret” for his actions. Barring Kazan’s public apology, Brando concludes, “I think it would be less than appropriate to extend to him any formal meritorious gesture,” and “I will withhold my permission to have any part of the motion pictures that I have appeared in . . . displayed on the night of the 71st Academy Awards.”68

  It is sometimes suggested that On the Waterfront signaled the passing of an era in filmmaking. Black and white, fact-based, its cast filled with neighborhood extras, the picture’s Hoboken, New Jersey, location was integral to the story it told. Darryl Zanuck became notorious for telling Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg, in repudiating their request that he produce it, “It’s exactly what audiences don’t want to see now. . . . Who gives a shit about longshoremen?”69 In fact, his presumption was fundamentally correct—that the industry’s future was in wide-screen color movies, which displayed what movies could offer. Under siege from television as much as from HUAC, many in the industry believed that pictures like On the Waterfront would soon be obsolete. Yet, despite its European neorealist look, the film’s nine Oscars at the 1955 Academy Awards ceremony (which tied the record with Gone with the Wind and From Here to Eternity) proved that it had something to say to American audiences.

  The story of the lonely former boxer Terry Malloy; his love interest Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint); his brother Charley, the “brains” of the mob (Rod Steiger); parish priest Father Barry (Karl Malden); and mob boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) is one of suffering and hard luck. A congregation on the docks of Hoboken could be the last stop before Abyssinia (Ethiopia) for Father Barry.70 Johnny Friendly has worked his way up, fatherless, from abject poverty. Edie’s father tells her that he has labored so hard on the docks to pay for her teachers’ college in Tarrytown, that one arm is longer than the other, and her brother has been killed for violating the longshoremen’s code of silence. Terry is an orphan whose loyalty to his older brother Charley is explained by their hardscrabble upbringing. The world of On the Waterfront is so unforgiving that a dockworker named Kayo Duggan (Pat Henning), granted his wish for a shipment of Irish whiskey, dies when the load falls on his head. His death is no accident, and the fact that much of this suffering can be traced to identifiable human agents is the source of the plot and character motivation.

  Budd Schulberg’s screenplay was based on a series of Pulitzer Prize–winning articles by Malcolm Johnson, “Crime on the Waterfront,” published in the New York Sun from 1948 to 1950. An exposé of union corruption on the New York docks, Johnson’s series highlighted the collusion among unions, the mob, shipping companies, and local politicians who were paid to overlook the exploitation of workers and violence against anyone who objected. Schulberg, the son of a producer, had written a respected Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run (1941), and another about graft in boxing, The Harder They Fall (1947), and was drawn to the brutal world of waterfront crime. Convinced that the subject would make a good script, he met Malcolm Johnson and, through him, a waterfront priest, John Corridan, who became the model for Malden’s Father Barry. The result was a script that became the basis for On the Waterfront. While the script was the work of many hands, with substantial contributions by Kazan and producer Sam Spiegel, its essential component was Schulberg’s passion. Kazan’s respect for Schulberg, together with their shared experiences as “friendly witnesses” before HUAC, ensured a positive collaboration between director and screenwriter. Among the most significant of the changes introduced by Kazan was the gradual subordination of Father Barry, the main character in the early scripts, to Terry Malloy.71

  Terry is a man whose simple goal, survival, is overridden by circumstances that force him to take a stand. Tough but powerless, he has gotten along by giving in. Finally, motivated by love, he defends himself against the mob. In notes to Brando, Kazan emphasized the character’s loneliness, as well as his asceticism and inner struggle. His wounds show, despite his swagger; still, his cynicism in conversations with Edie is betrayed by the doubt and sensitivity in his eyes. Brando reconceives Kazan’s notes, adding facets that enlarge his uneducated, inarticulate boxer into the ultimate democratic hero. Brando shows the same mast
ery here that he did in the television show Come Out Fighting. There is the ex-boxer’s walk—on his toes, but heavy—the arms close to the body, a gait that suggests regret toward the physical power that he never delivered. He evinces the uncalculating charm of a young man discovering a woman—teasing her about her childhood braids and braces, asking her out without trying to mask his desire. In their first passionate kiss against the wall in her bedroom, his hunger for her lips, her smell, reveals feelings as pure as the flowers on the wallpaper.

  Though his brother Charley is the talker and Terry Malloy comparatively reticent, he is nevertheless responsible for some of the most renowned lines in movie history. “I’m not gonna hurt nobody. I’m just gonna go down there and get my rights.” “From where you stand maybe. . . . But I’m standing over here now. I was ratting on myself all them years, I didn’t even know it.” “I’m going to take it out of their skulls!” Brando makes his usual modifications to the words on the page: dropping phrases, adding inflections and emphases. In every instance, what might have been overlooked becomes memorable.

  Here, for instance, is the scripted version of Terry on Edie’s maturation: “The thought I wanted to get over is that you grew up beauteeful.” Now Brando’s revision: “I’m just kidding you a little bit. . . . I just mean to tell you, that you grew up very nice.” Brando added the “dink” when he and Edie click glasses during their first drink together. In these scenes with Edie, Brando’s changes soften Terry, highlighting his playfulness. They also illuminate a fundamental aspect of Terry and Edie’s relationship: It recalls the past, allowing them to experience as adults a childhood wonder they were denied. Brando’s changes to the famous taxi scene serve similarly to enhance meaning.

  Charley is presumably taking Terry to a sporting event, but we know that Johnny Friendly has enlisted him to ensure that Terry, who has been subpoenaed to testify against the mob, doesn’t. The cab ride is Charley’s last chance; if he can’t persuade his brother, he must deliver him to Friendly at the ride’s end. Terry resists, and Charley in frustration draws his gun. Throughout the scene, Brando’s alterations call attention to the stark divisions their banter works to suppress. Charley tries to convince Terry to take the better-paying job that the mob is offering to keep him quiet, and Terry responds, according to the script: “A steady job and a few bucks extra, that’s all I wanted.” Brando’s alteration—“a couple extra potatoes” for “a few bucks extra”—forcibly distinguishes Terry from his corrupt brother. As a humble Irish potato-eater, he is content with the simple fare afforded by an honest day’s work; he doesn’t need steak and suits.72

  Brando’s legendary revisions to what follows after Charley pulls his gun on Terry extends this distinction. Schulberg recalled Brando’s improvisations: “After a marvelous look that conveys more sadness than anger, Brando sighs, takes an eloquent pause, and says, ‘Wow.’ That one little syllable is so right that it provides an emotional key to the entire scene.” More a gasp than a word, it highlights Terry’s shock at his protective older brother becoming momentarily aggressive. By confronting Charley with the enormity of what he has contemplated, it reconciled the scene’s ending where Charley frees Terry and continues on to certain death as his brother’s sacrificial substitute.73 Brando’s gasp gives way to candor, liberating Terry to express for the first time his grievance over another betrayal by Charley. Again, Brando’s revisions are critical. Schulberg’s “Final Shooting Script”: “I could’ve been a contender, I could’ve had class and been somebody. Real class. Instead of a bum, let’s face it, which is what I am.” Brando’s version: “I could a had class, I could a been a contender, I could a been somebody—instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it.” The effect of Brando’s paring and rearrangement is to build, phrase by phrase, to “somebody,” which reveals the devastating nature of Terry’s loss. The victory, so close and inevitable, would have made him someone; coerced by the mob to throw the fight, he is nothing.

  “If there is a better performance by a man in the history of film in America, I don’t know what it is.” Cast, crew, screenwriter—all agreed with Kazan’s assessment. Of the high points (the cab conversation; Terry finding Charley’s body; the glove in the park), Kazan conceded, “I didn’t direct that; Marlon showed me, as he often did, how the scene should be performed. I could never have told him how to do that scene as well as he did it.”74 While there is no denying the power of the script and Brando’s delivery of it, what he accomplishes without using words matters even more.

  Brando’s handling of the gun Charley draws on Terry in the cab transforms a killing device into the saddest instrument on earth, a symbol of lost fraternity. By gently pushing it down, Brando drains the gun of its murderous phallic power and also anticipates the subsequent recuperation of their fraternal bond, in a scene where the same gun figures prominently. After Charley is killed by the mob, his body hung in the alley on a grappling hook, Terry storms into Friendly’s bar, Charley’s gun drawn, seeking vengeance. Terry is bleeding profusely, having cut his arm while escaping an assault in the alley. Father Barry arrives and tries to defuse Terry’s rage, suggesting he avenge Charley’s death by testifying against Friendly in court. As Terry considers the priest’s advice, he massages his wound absentmindedly with the gun, a gesture that echoes the previous scene, this time by transforming the weapon into a means of comfort. Terry subsequently hurls the gun into a framed portrait of Johnny Friendly, signaling thus his decision to testify. For the moment, at least, Terry opts for his brother’s method, words, over his own, punches.

  Brando’s intimacy with the nonverbal and even inanimate world in the film expands the scope of his performance. The dominant metaphor is the pigeon (Schulberg raised racing pigeons as a boy in California), and Brando’s brilliant work makes some of these scenes excruciating. Terry identifies with the pigeons he keeps on the rooftop of the building where he lives; he tends them in a way he was never cared for himself, worrying about their vulnerability to the preying hawks. Then there is the double meaning of pigeon. From Terry’s unwitting setup of “stool pigeon” Joey Doyle in the opening to the violent close where Terry succeeds through a fierce fistfight with Johnny Friendly in redefining that term, Terry struggles to avoid becoming a snitch. Terry’s sham discovery of Joey’s racing pigeon catalyzes the plot. It gets Joey to the roof where he is killed, brings Terry to the attention of the crime commission investigating corruption on the docks, and keeps Joey’s sister Edie in town. Terry tells Edie that pigeons have gotten a bum rap; contrary to common belief, they are brave and loyal, their marriages ending only in death. Brando holds the birds with tender familiarity, and his reaction to their slaughter is yet another illuminating evocation of grief. He shows in a single scene how loss permeates the one who grieves at that moment and forever.

  On the roof after testifying against Friendly at the crime commission hearing, Terry sees Tommy, a boy who had once idolized him but now despises him for “singing to the cops.” Tommy tosses Terry’s dead prized racer at him, shouting “a pigeon for a pigeon,” and runs off. Dead bird in hand, Terry crosses the roof to find that Tommy has killed the entire flock. Brando expresses the fullness of Terry’s grief through his body. Partially hidden by the door as he looks into the coop, he responds to Edie, who has followed him, with a silent bid for privacy. In the gentle motion of the hand that waves her away, Brando conveys the enormity of a grief that cannot be shared. There are other such moments: Terry stops beside his dead brother to rest his hand against the wall, before hugging the body to lift it gently off the hook; he grabs the jacket inherited from Joey Doyle and Kayo Duggan as he heads for the docks, pausing to rip a stray thread off the collar (like an act of superstition, to ensure he will survive). These plain gestures make the material world symbolic. Terry puts on the biblical “robe of righteousness” for the first time, the jacket worn by those, Doyle and Duggan, who dared to repudiate “D and D”—deaf and dumb—in the name of justice. After testifying, Terry is abl
e to assume their garment, remembering their suffering and death.75

  When Terry takes on Johnny Friendly singlehandedly in a fistfight, two things are certain: Terry will get no help from the longshoremen cowering nearby, and Friendly’s goons will step in as soon as he calls to them. As the fight begins, the camera sweeps slowly over a small boat labeled “Rebel, New York,” an identity that raises more questions than it answers. Can rebel be attached to a place or is it a state of mind? What does it mean to rebel against forces greater than yourself, to refuse to be pushed around, to stand your ground and speak out? The film’s final image of the big man in the expensive coat calling the little men in their tattered jackets to work as the iron door descends, leaves small hope of equity or liberation for the longshoremen in On the Waterfront. Terry seems caught in a dynamic of loss and rage that is the plight of the disempowered. The murder of his brother by Friendly’s mob spurs his testimony against Friendly; the slaughter of his pigeons drives him into physical combat. Still the film implies that fulfillment for Terry comes in the act of rebellion itself.

  On roof with dead pigeon after testifying. Photograph by Columbia Pictures/Getty Images.

  There is no evidence that either Kazan or Schulberg was aware of the Albert Camus study The Rebel (1951), which caused a sensation in France and the United States for portraying Communism as a destructive creed and initiating a rift between Camus and his friend Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher. The Rebel defined rebellion as a type of morality that impelled individuals to act against injustice and tyranny in any form and helped them to adhere to transcendent values, specifically the value of life itself. During extended stays in France in the years before making On the Waterfront, Brando was often at Les Deux Magots, a café frequented by Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Camus, and other French intellectuals and artists. He was at the café, for instance, in the spring of 1952 when he learned of Elia Kazan’s HUAC testimony.76