silver nitrate notes

On the Waterfront and the New Jersey Wind

30 nov 2020

Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) was his return to the director's chair after his testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952. Kazan named names. The American theatre and film community mostly did not forgive him. The film he made next, which is about a young longshoreman who eventually informs on his union's mob leadership to federal authorities, is often read as Kazan's argument for his own decision. Whether the reading is fair is an argument that has not stopped.

The cinematographer was Boris Kaufman (1906-1980), whom we have met in this blog before for his later work on 12 Angry Men. On the Waterfront is his first Kazan collaboration and won him the Oscar. It is also the film where Kaufman first photographs American working-class exteriors in a manner he had brought with him from his prewar French documentary work with Jean Vigo.

Kazan shot the film entirely in Hoboken, New Jersey, in the winter of 1953-1954. The shoot was cold. Kaufman used the cold. He rated his film stock low so that the grain rendered in the final print as texture, not noise. He photographed the longshoremen's breath visible in the air; the frozen puddles on the docks; the overcoats that Brando and Rod Steiger and Karl Malden wear buttoned to the neck. The film looks cold because the film was cold. There is a quality of shivering in the image that a studio-shot version of the same story could not have produced.

The famous scene is the one in the taxi, where Brando as Terry Malloy tells his brother Charlie (Steiger) that he could have been a contender. The scene is shot as a two-shot with the actors facing forward, the camera in the front seat. Brando's delivery is quiet, cracked, almost inaudible. The scene has been performed and parodied a thousand times since. What is worth noticing, on a current viewing, is Kaufman's lighting: the light in the taxi is motivated entirely by passing streetlights outside. The lighting moves. Brando's face is lit and unlit as the taxi moves forward. The scene is not static because the lighting is not static.

Malden, playing the priest Father Barry, gives the other performance in the film worth taking seriously alongside Brando's. His sermon on the docks, delivered over the body of a murdered longshoreman while the mob boos from the catwalks above, is the single most morally clear speech in an American studio film of the 1950s. Whether Kazan was entitled to make a film with this speech in it, given his own decisions, is another question. He made it anyway.

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sources
[1] Kazan, Elia. A Life. Knopf, 1988.
[2] Schickel, Richard. Elia Kazan: A Biography. HarperCollins, 2005.
[3] Rapf, Joanna E. (ed.). On the Waterfront. Cambridge Film Handbooks, 2003.
[4] Kaufman, Boris. Interview in American Cinematographer, August 1955.