Elia Kazan: On the Waterfront and the HCUA Controversy
On the Waterfront was Kazan's response to his testimony to the House Committee of Un-American Activities (HCUA), but what was the true implication of him testifying?
Elia Kazan was a director who is probably most known for directing Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront (1954). If you ignore the history and watch the film just in terms of craft and story, it is a beautiful piece of work, but I think it’s unavoidable to examine this film without looking into the history behind it. At the time of the Hollywood blacklist in 1952, Kazan testified in front of the House Committee of Un-American Activities. He gave the names of a total of eight actors who were members with him in a Communist Party at the Group Theater in the 1930’s. Others who testified tended to downplay their statements, but Kazan took an ad out in the New York Times, attempting to defend his testimony.
Then, in 1954, On the Waterfront premiered. There are different schools of thought on whether the film is a direct response to his testimony. Kazan himself has said it is, but the screenwriter, Budd Schulberg has said that it’s a coincidence. Let’s look at the film and see for ourselves.
The film follows Terry Malloy, a former prizefighter who is now a longshoreman. At the beginning of the film, he helps his boss lure a fellow dockworker, Joey Doyle, up to a roof. Malloy thinks that Joey is just going to be verbally reprimanded, but the man is instead pushed off the building and falls to his death. Terry feels guilt over this, and connects with Joey’s sister (played by Eva Marie Saint), who tries to get Terry to do the right thing and expose the corrupt union behind her brother’s murder.
I’m sure you’re seeing the parallels here by now. Terry Malloy is supposed to be Elia Kazan, and the corrupt union are all of the communists and communist sympathizers in Hollywood and NYC who criticized Kazan for naming names. This is quite the leap to make, equating standing up to a corrupt organization that’s responsible for a murder to ratting out your communist friends? If this was truly Kazan’s intent, the film loses a lot of its credibility in my eyes. If we look at the film through this lens, it strikes me as being made by someone who’s playing the victim. “Oh, poor me! I’m just trying to do the right thing and look at what people are doing to me!” Rather than looking inward and debating whether what he did may have hurt others unnecessarily, he instead doubles down and makes himself the victim in Marlon Brando’s character.
Like I said earlier though, Budd Schulburg, who wrote the screenplay for On the Waterfront, has always denied that this was the intent of the film. He said he started working on it before the event even happened. Regardless of that, I do think that Kazan saw parallels and tried to highlight those when making the film. In 1988, Kazan had the following to say on the topic:
When Brando, at the end, yells at Lee Cobb, the mob boss, “I’m glad what I done—you hear me! — glad what I done!” that was me saying, with identical heat, that I was glad I testified as I had.
So maybe Schulburg didn’t write the script with the intention of it commenting on Kazan’s testimony, but the director definitely shaped the film around that concept. Once you watch the film with that in mind, it’s hard to watch it through any other lens.
I loved this film when I was in college, as I think a lot of young theater makers did, and still do. In one of my acting classes, we watched the famous scene where Eva Marie Saint drops her glove and Brando picks it up and starts to play with it as they continue the scene. It’s such a simple thing that changed the way acting was approached on screen, and it’s still a formative film for me. I can enjoy it from an acting standpoint, but it’s important to grapple with the complicated history surrounding it, as we seem to be learning throughout this exploration of film history.
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Edit: I forgot to include the New York Times piece that Kazan wrote in response to the criticism for ratting on his commie friends. Here it is below!
