Father Pete Barry (played by Karl Malden): “Some people think the Crucifixion only took place on Calvary. Well, they better wise up!”—On the Waterfront (1954), screenplay by Budd Schulberg, directed by Elia Kazan
The American Express commercials that Karl Malden made for two decades might have earned him financial security for his old age. And his performance as Blanche DuBois’ lonely suitor Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire might have won him his Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
But for me, the versatile character actor—who died four days ago, following the far-more publicized celebrity deaths of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett-Majors and, of course, Michael Jackson-- is inextricably linked with On the Waterfront, which ranks with A Man for All Seasons as my favorite film.
For all the latter’s brilliance, though, Elia Kazan’s movie has a far more tangible claim on my affection and interests: at times, it feels like a documentary of the milieu and times associated with my mother and her siblings in the first half of this century.
The parochial schools that Terry Malloy (played by Marlon Brandon) and Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint, pictured here with Malden) recall attending as children were the kind that the Lenihans attended in New York. The pigeon coops that fascinate Terry also provided a rooftop hobby for my Uncle Pete. Another one of my uncles, Ben, witnessed some of the 36-day location shooting in Hoboken, N.J., as a Port Authority cop. The dispiriting “shape-up” routine and corrupt dock union bosses in the film also drained the energy of my grandfather Michael on a daily basis.
And the priest, Fr. Barry, would have wielded the same moral authority that other clerics did in the South Bronx churches where the family worshipped from the Twenties to the Fifties. The quote above is part of his powerful sermon calling shamed but scared laborers to account as they behold their own version of martyrdom: the corpse of a co-worker who tried to tell the truth about the brutality they faced every day.
Malden passed away on the 25th anniversary of the death of the tough priest who inspired his character Fr. Barry, Fr. John Corridan. When they met Corridan as they hunted for background details to flesh out a story based on Malcolm Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning expose of waterfront extortion and violence, Kazan and Schulberg couldn’t believe at first that such a committed, street-smart figure could be a cleric. (Fr. Barry’s “Crucifixion” speech is, in fact, largely based on Corridan’s speech to union workers after one of them took his advice by standing up to the bosses.)
The presence of two other cast members, Lee J. Cobb (union boss Johnny Friendly) and Rod Steiger (Terry Malloy’s mobbed-up brother Charlie) in the Best Supporting Actor category made it well-nigh impossible for Malden to put another Oscar on his mantelpiece. Yet, perhaps more than the other two, he possessed the crucial role in the film’s plot.
If Johnny Friendly is the brutish force that lays waste to everything and Charlie is the compromiser who loses his soul and his life in the bargain, then Fr. Barry is the prodding, indomitable conscience of the movie.
The brilliance of On the Waterfront as sheer craft—Leonard Bernstein’s powerful score, the much-imitated dialogue (“I coulda been a contender), and Kazan’s always adept hand with actors—blinds many students of film to a perhaps more important aspect of the movie: In insisting that we cannot escape the consequences of our actions or inactions, its high moral seriousness stands as a continuing rebuke to today’s film industry of multimillion-dollar blockbusters and crude, brain-dead “bromances.”
Terry Malloy would rather stay in his chicken coop than face up to the choice that awaits him on the docks. The moral ambiguity of informing—a horror bred into the bones of Irish-Americans from one failed rebellion in their homeland after another—is only reinforced by the ostracism he experiences from co-workers and even from neighborhood kids who despise him as a “stool pigeon.”
The “thorn in the flesh” in St. Paul is manifested in Terry’s anguish over involvement with the death of Joey, the brother of Eva Marie Saint’s character Edie. But, though his "thorn" might save Terry, like the apostle, from self-righteousness, he also cannot let it prevent him from doing what he must: suffer humiliation and mortification of the flesh on his own road to Calvary.
Beaten to a pulp by Friendly’s thugs, Terry stumbles and falls, like Christ carrying his cross. Even Brando’s face in this final scene replicates Christian imagery in its multiple bloody wounds.
Malden liked to joke about his unglamorous looks and blue-collar background (he was the only ex-milkman that Vivien Leigh ever kissed, he claimed), but it served him well in embodying how a distinctly ordinary man could rise up and inspire others to perform extraordinary deeds.
The American Express commercials that Karl Malden made for two decades might have earned him financial security for his old age. And his performance as Blanche DuBois’ lonely suitor Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire might have won him his Best Supporting Actor Oscar.
But for me, the versatile character actor—who died four days ago, following the far-more publicized celebrity deaths of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett-Majors and, of course, Michael Jackson-- is inextricably linked with On the Waterfront, which ranks with A Man for All Seasons as my favorite film.
For all the latter’s brilliance, though, Elia Kazan’s movie has a far more tangible claim on my affection and interests: at times, it feels like a documentary of the milieu and times associated with my mother and her siblings in the first half of this century.
The parochial schools that Terry Malloy (played by Marlon Brandon) and Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint, pictured here with Malden) recall attending as children were the kind that the Lenihans attended in New York. The pigeon coops that fascinate Terry also provided a rooftop hobby for my Uncle Pete. Another one of my uncles, Ben, witnessed some of the 36-day location shooting in Hoboken, N.J., as a Port Authority cop. The dispiriting “shape-up” routine and corrupt dock union bosses in the film also drained the energy of my grandfather Michael on a daily basis.
And the priest, Fr. Barry, would have wielded the same moral authority that other clerics did in the South Bronx churches where the family worshipped from the Twenties to the Fifties. The quote above is part of his powerful sermon calling shamed but scared laborers to account as they behold their own version of martyrdom: the corpse of a co-worker who tried to tell the truth about the brutality they faced every day.
Malden passed away on the 25th anniversary of the death of the tough priest who inspired his character Fr. Barry, Fr. John Corridan. When they met Corridan as they hunted for background details to flesh out a story based on Malcolm Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning expose of waterfront extortion and violence, Kazan and Schulberg couldn’t believe at first that such a committed, street-smart figure could be a cleric. (Fr. Barry’s “Crucifixion” speech is, in fact, largely based on Corridan’s speech to union workers after one of them took his advice by standing up to the bosses.)
The presence of two other cast members, Lee J. Cobb (union boss Johnny Friendly) and Rod Steiger (Terry Malloy’s mobbed-up brother Charlie) in the Best Supporting Actor category made it well-nigh impossible for Malden to put another Oscar on his mantelpiece. Yet, perhaps more than the other two, he possessed the crucial role in the film’s plot.
If Johnny Friendly is the brutish force that lays waste to everything and Charlie is the compromiser who loses his soul and his life in the bargain, then Fr. Barry is the prodding, indomitable conscience of the movie.
The brilliance of On the Waterfront as sheer craft—Leonard Bernstein’s powerful score, the much-imitated dialogue (“I coulda been a contender), and Kazan’s always adept hand with actors—blinds many students of film to a perhaps more important aspect of the movie: In insisting that we cannot escape the consequences of our actions or inactions, its high moral seriousness stands as a continuing rebuke to today’s film industry of multimillion-dollar blockbusters and crude, brain-dead “bromances.”
Terry Malloy would rather stay in his chicken coop than face up to the choice that awaits him on the docks. The moral ambiguity of informing—a horror bred into the bones of Irish-Americans from one failed rebellion in their homeland after another—is only reinforced by the ostracism he experiences from co-workers and even from neighborhood kids who despise him as a “stool pigeon.”
The “thorn in the flesh” in St. Paul is manifested in Terry’s anguish over involvement with the death of Joey, the brother of Eva Marie Saint’s character Edie. But, though his "thorn" might save Terry, like the apostle, from self-righteousness, he also cannot let it prevent him from doing what he must: suffer humiliation and mortification of the flesh on his own road to Calvary.
Beaten to a pulp by Friendly’s thugs, Terry stumbles and falls, like Christ carrying his cross. Even Brando’s face in this final scene replicates Christian imagery in its multiple bloody wounds.
Malden liked to joke about his unglamorous looks and blue-collar background (he was the only ex-milkman that Vivien Leigh ever kissed, he claimed), but it served him well in embodying how a distinctly ordinary man could rise up and inspire others to perform extraordinary deeds.
The man he emulated (even to the point of wearing his hat and coat), Fr. Corridan, changed the perceptions of everyone with whom he came in contact, and what it meant to be a priest and even a Christian. Not a bad example for the rest of us Terry Malloys.
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