Elia Kazan directed it from a Budd Schulberg script. He’d recently testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and named suspected communists, destroying their careers to save his own. Some people view the movie as an apologia for his informing on them! It wasn’t easy for Brando to do the film: his sister Jocelyn had been an actress herself, until she became a victim of the Hollywood blacklist. (There was controversy decades later when they gave Kazan a lifetime achievement Oscar.)
What do I think of the movie? On the one hand, parts of it are great. The most famous scene is the one with him and his brother Rod Steiger in the back of a car remembering the fight where Brando was pressured to take a dive. But my favourite scene is the one on the rooftop with Brando and Eva Marie Saint. I like the detail where he tries on her glove. What makes the Brando character interesting, paradoxically, is that he isn’t very articulate. (When a character gets too articulate, he becomes the writer’s mouthpiece.)
On the other hand, parts of it are lame. Leonard Bernstein’s score is surprisingly weak. The priest played by Karl Malden is pretty hard to take. The dialogue isn’t perfect. There’s a line, “You know how a union meeting works—you go in, you make a speech, you go out and the lights go out.” It’s a memorable line, but unfair to the union movement, at whose meetings they’ve often discussed important things. And I could do without this exchange:
“My life ain’t worth a plugged nickel if I squeal!”
“How much is your soul worth if you don’t?”
And then there’s that conclusion where he says to the racketeers “Without a gun, you’re nothin’!” The racketeers give him a beating, but that just turns the longshoremen against them. So a bloodied but unbowed Brando leads the others into work. Instead of beating him, those racketeers would have been smarter to ignore him. Then they would have won, like in real life.
But overall, it’s pretty good.
