"On the Waterfront" Retrospective: The Cost Of Being A Scumbag

Elia Kazan says he did no wrong. His movie says otherwise.

March 28, 2023

When he was 14, Anthony Rapp got invited to a party by Kevin Spacey, who would become one of the world's premier actors. Spacey, 26 at the time, tried to force Rapp to have sex. While unknown if it was the first instance of Spacey trying to commit statutory rape, it would certainly not be the last.

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Rapp came forward in 2017, starting a stream of allegations that Spacey had overstepped the bounds of professionalism and legality in establishing physical contact with underage males. The controversy destroyed Spacey’s career and caused us to view his performances in a different light. Conceptually, there’s little cause to squirm at Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects, a meager criminal relaying the story of mythical Hungarian crime lord Keyser Söze to a hard-nosed detective. The same is not so for Lester Burnham, American Beauty’s sexually frustrated suburban antihero whose entire story builds to his attempted seduction of his daughter’s teenage friend.

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In 2019, Thora Birch, who played his daughter in the film, acknowledged the horror of Spacey’s deviancy but asked that we judge American Beauty on its merit. It’s not the movie’s fault Spacey is a predator. We should separate art from life.

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It’s a fair request. Art isn’t a person. It’s made by people and reflects those people, but art itself is just art. It’s not a movie’s fault an actor is a predator.

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But what happens when a film’s purpose is to rationalize the choices of its creator? How can we make that separation, acknowledging the merit of a thing irrespective of our feelings towards its message, when the artist intends to conjoin himself with his work and feed off the goodwill by association? Can we reasonably be expected to celebrate achievement if the movie repudiates our perspective on the decisions of its maker?

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On the Waterfront is the story of Terry Malloy, a former prizefighter who works on the docks in his hometown. One night, he lures his friend Joey to a roof, ostensibly to get convinced to not testify to the Waterfront Crime Commission, but Joey gets murdered. Fearing the wrath of Johnny Friendly, the mob boss who exercises criminal supremacy over the docks, the workers do nothing. After reconnecting with Joey’s sister, Edie, Terry reconsiders his silence and comes to accept that he must risk everything to do what’s right.

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The veil is thin, the intent insultingly transparent. In 1952, as Senator Joseph McCarthy and his Red Scare infected the country with anti-communist paranoia, Elia Kazan got called upon to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. In the mid-30s he was a member of the Communist Party, along with many of his Hollywood contemporaries. In his testimony, he committed the most heinous act of relational treason: he named names.

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Eight, to be exact, all of whom got blacklisted as a result of their Communist ties. Kazan got shunned for his decision, losing countless friends due to his betrayal. He claimed the HUAC was aware of all those he named, a claim that remains unverified. He said he chose the lesser of two evils, though what the graver evil was remains unknown. In truth, it was a feeble act carried out by a self-serving, disingenuous, soulless coward, a member of the vilest sect of our deteriorating populace: the spineless wrongdoer.

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On the Waterfront was not just a film. It was not an apology or an explanation. It was not an acknowledgment that ethics aren’t always binary and are occasionally determined by circumstance. It was a condemnation of condemnation, a refusal to admit fault to those who decried his treachery: he was right to do what he did; everyone was wrong for labeling him a monster.

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In this light, the film is troubling, chiefly because it exposes that whatever righteousness Kazan felt, whatever moral high ground he believed he had, was non-existent. Not even he could face what he had done, a truth clear in the story. Terry is a man compelled to offer testimony that would expel evil from his waterfront world. He gets shunned for even considering the proposition because everyone else fears retribution. He is the only chance at justice and redemption for the world he occupies. He is a singular entity with a worthy cause.

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Kazan was none of these things, even in his own accounting. Terry’s willingness to flip on Johnny Friendly is the sole dictator of the waterfront’s fate and justice for Joey. According to Kazan, the HUAC already had the identities of those he named in his testimony.

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The dockworkers reject Terry when he ultimately gives in and testifies against the criminal overlord holding the waterfront under his thumb, but only because they haven’t the conviction to do what’s right. Kazan got shunned for betraying his friends, whose activities in which he was complicit.

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Terry was not the only person privy to this treachery but had the inner knowledge necessary to resolve it. If the names were already known to the HUAC, Kazan was just a figurehead whose testimony would legitimize McCarthy’s witch hunt.

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How can we praise a film that justifies Kazan's choice when the man won't admit the nature of that choice? There are no parallels between Terry’s journey and Kazan’s, no matter how desperately the latter tries to convince us otherwise. His delusional sense of heroism is literally divine. After Friendly’s hooligans murder a man he convinced to testify, Father Barry decries the act as crucifixion. Kazan fashions himself as Christ, misunderstood to the point of damnation. Barry assures the killers that “if you don’t think Christ is down here on the waterfront, you’ve got another thing comin’!” Kazan is our Christ, just as Terry proves to be the waterfront’s.

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But for what reason and at what cost? Terry suffers the wrath of Friendly, a man whose relationship with him is not amiable like Kazan’s colleagues’ was to him, but what else? He gets shunned until the workers find the courage to do the right thing, but what is right? In the film it is clear, but what does Kazan think is so “right” about his choice? He wasn’t doing right by anyone in his industry or making some misunderstood sacrifice. He folded. He bent over and got spanked, willingly and at the expense of his friends.

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Independent of its purpose, On the Waterfront is as affecting as it is flawed. For all his revolutionary method acting, Brando’s performance isn’t compelling. It’s often at odds with the material: his moments of realism conflict with the movie's thematic hyperbole and the rest of his performance is so theatrical it's cartoonish. The initial fight over the tobs and the church escape may have been thrilling in 1954, but they’re choppy and hammy and do little to affect mood and feeling.

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It does manage to become a moderately compelling drama when centered around Edie’s desperation to secure justice for her dead brother and Terry’s emotional conflict over his feelings for her and his loyalty to Friendly. Its quieter moments, like Edie chastising Terry for his cowardice or his lonely laments on his rooftop, are effective but get overshadowed by the melodrama. It lacks finesse, nuance, true subtext, or subtlety. It never justifies Terry's actions because it never establishes ethical opposition. He has no reason not to testify except fear, the cheapest of all motives.

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On the Waterfront ultimately relies on whether we can do for it what Thora Birch asks us to do for American Beauty, but how can we? How can we separate art from life when Kazan demands we view him in a way he didn't earn for things he didn’t do? He expects worship when he can't tell us the truth, and how he views his actions completely contrasts reality.

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It's shameless revisionism to assuage his guilt over not feeling guilt, an insulting ode to cowardice and dishonesty. It stands for what we've finally accepted long after we should have: the things we like don’t matter. They can matter individually, or in a small group, or even to the tune of making billions of dollars. But against objective ethics they mean nothing.

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Can we justly minimize Kazan’s actions and the shameless fashion in which he demands we support them simply because betraying your friends and colleagues isn’t as bad as, say, the sexual abuse committed by R. Kelly? Because by placing all wrong things under the umbrella of “bad” we can’t fawn over a movie?

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No. No more. One may be worse than the other, but a rotten fruit is just as inedible as an extra rotten fruit. We shouldn’t pluck it from the tree or even consider eating it. It isn’t worth it. Elia Kazan is not worth it.

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‍On the Waterfront is not worth it.