Judas to Christ

FIFTY YEARS IS an eternity in pop culture, but it's probably not enough time to restore Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront to its rightful place of honor. Kazan's 1954 drama about an ex-boxer turned dockworker who informs on his corrupt union won five Oscars, earned a spot in the pantheon of noteworthy American movies and made Hollywood safe for Method acting, courtesy of Marlon Brando's still-astonishing performance as tormented hero Terry Malloy. But it's a classic with a political asterisk that threatens to eclipse the film's considerable merits.

The asterisk was born in 1952, when ex-socialist Kazan was twice called before the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating communist influence on the entertainment industry. He resisted at first, then caved and named names. Years later, Kazan pointed out that many other working artists named names without experiencing such intense, sustained vilification (their ranks included Clifford Odets, Waterfront writer Budd Schulberg and costar Lee J. Cobb, and Lucille Ball). He wondered, self-servingly but not unfairly, if American communists would say they were sorry for tacitly cheerleading tyranny. His attitude mingled defiance and regret. "I don't think there's anything in my life toward which I have more ambivalence, because obviously, there's something disgusting about giving other people's names," he said in 1971.

Indeed. Kazan was a minor but significant American artist whose influence is still felt-a groundbreaking theater director and moviemaker who fused social realism, Freudian theory and quasi-gothic melodrama, and helped bold actors like Brando create a new kind of stylized truth. (Waterfront is his masterwork, but A Streetcar Named Desire, East of Eden, Baby Doll and Wild River also deserve a look.) He was also, inarguably, a man who failed a defining test of decency and nerve. His ratting harmed others and stained his career, and on its basest level, the narrative of On the Waterfront-which was conceived years before Kazan's HUAAC testimony-does read like shameful autobiography rewritten as heroic myth.

But if you peek beneath the surface-and accept the proposition that a work can say things its creators did not consciously intend-things get a bit more tangled. The film's religiously, politically and morally fraught subtext effectively inverts its text, creating an alternate, wish-fulfillment version of Kazan's actions. At once a self-justifying revision and a searing confession of moral failure, it's an extraordinarily truthful lie, and one of the most complex, contradictory, guilt-ridden films of the 50s.

The source of guilt, clearly laid out in the "contender" scene, is Terry's bone-deep knowledge that he's a fraud-a wannabe fighter who had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to seize greatness but took a dive for short-end money, granting thugs an open-ended lease on his soul. (American communists don't get rich, but Hollywood directors do.) Terry feels shame and regret but won't (or can't) articulate it. He hides his role (inadvertent but hardly innocent) in the murder of a would-be informer, Joey Doyle, because he doesn't want Joey's beautiful, shattered kid sister, Edie (Eva Marie Saint), to know how weak he is. He repeatedly evades his obligation to right the wrongs he abetted-an evasion signified, in one of the film's many point-blank biblical allusions, by Terry's refusal to don the late Joey Doyle's coat, then passing it to another doomed informer.

Edie, crusading priest Father Barry (Karl Malden) and other characters implore Terry to listen to his conscience, and eventually he does. Clad in Joe's coat, he informs on the criminal tormentors who murdered his mobster brother, Charley (Rod Steiger), calls them out at the docks, endures a fantastically brutal beating-as-crucifixion, then rises again (Judas as Jesus) and goes to work, with the stone-faced endorsement of coworkers who once treated him as a pariah. "It was you, Charley," Terry says, shifting the blame. But by the film's end, he's telling the whole dock he was ratting on himself all those years "and didn't even know it."

Does Terry stand for Kazan doing what he did, or what he didn't have the guts to do? Most likely both-and rather than disqualify the film as meaningful pop art, these front-and-center contradictions invite a more nuanced look. Besides, if the work of Roman Polanski, Charlie Chaplin and Michael Jackson can be savored and honored apart from the damage they inflicted on other people, then doesn't Kazan's deserve to be extended a similar courtesy? And when through his work a tragically flawed artist says, "Do as I say, not as I do," are we entitled to cover our ears?

Beyond politics and autobiography, Waterfront is a superlative and pivotal American film. It is a screen-acting milestone mixing old-school performance styles (Cobb's snarling Johnny) and new (Brando, Malden, Saint). It is an esthetic marker separating one filmmaking era (the artificial, often studio-bound early sound era) from another (the on-location grit sanctified by postwar Italian neorealist movies, and subsequently embraced by the French and American New Waves). And it is a near-seamless fusion of genres-equal parts exposé, metaphoric apology/explanation, religious parable, polemic, noir-inflected gangster picture and urban western. (Waterfront could be double-billed with 1952's equally lean but less emotionally complex High Noon-another movie about an ostracized underdog accepting a moral imperative evaded by his community.)

Every line, shot and cut advances the story and deepens the characters, but Kazan and cinematographer Boris Kaufman-a veteran of German silents, saved from hackwork in tv advertising by Kazan's employment-never settle for mere functionality. They infuse each shot with hard beauty and tease out the religious allusions strewn like mines through Schulberg's intricate script. Waterfront is an encyclopedia of mythically potent images and inventive, much-imitated moments. Joey Doyle's lost pigeon, released from the street by Terry, ascending skyward (a departed soul) just as Joey is pushed off a roof to his death; Kaufman's slow dolly into Charlie's bullet-riddled body hanging on a meat hook, which visually connects with Father Barry's impromptu sermon citing "the Roman soldiers who pierced the crucified flesh of our Lord"; the primal desperation of Terry and Edie's kiss against an apartment wall, an act so intense and purifying that they sink, weak-kneed, to the floor (a moment stolen in Rocky); Terry by the water's edge, telling Edie the truth about Joey's death, his confession and her screams drowned out by the shriek of foghorns (a scene referenced, affectionately, in Rushmore).

Most of all, there's Brando's endlessly rewarding performance-a perfect marriage of invention and restraint. Brando translates Terry's ethical and spiritual turmoil into gestures. Note the boxer's skip in his step as he moves across the roof of his tenement building (a poignant reminder of what might have been); the unaffected sweetness with which he sits in a playground swing and dons one of Edie's dropped gloves (feminine tenderness enclosed by machismo); the faintly simian way he cups an unclosed fist over his chin in the scene in the bar with Edie, inclining his face at an angle that neutralizes his tough-guy pose and exaggerates the Neanderthal slope of his forehead (a dockside Kong, entranced).

Note, too, Brando's evolving posture as the film unfolds. At first he's slightly slumped and furtive, hands in pockets, head inclined-a body admitting shame not yet processed by Terry's conscience. Slowly but surely, he stands up and walks with more speed and purpose, until his climactic stagger toward the loading dock, which ends with Terry standing in what could be described as a defiant slouch-a gunslinger-in-spirit, looking fate in the eye; bloodied, unbowed; righteous at last.

A restored print of On the Waterfront opens on Fri., Nov. 5 and plays through Thurs., Nov. 11. at Film Forum 209 W. Houston St. (betw. Varick St. & 6th Ave.), 212-727-8110, call for times, $10.