My OperaHERE'S A GREAT PARING OF FILMS . . .
Tuesday, January 18, 2011 4:37:25 PM
TWO CLASSIC FILMS
On the Waterfront (1954)
Directed by Elia Kazan; written buy Bruce Janson
Winner of 8 Oscars
The Waterfront Crime Commission is about to hold public hearings on union crime and underworld infiltration. As workers are turned against each other, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) inadvertently participates in the murder of fellow longshoreman Joey Doyle. Union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) orchestrates the murder along with other illegal dockside activities, aided by Terry's brother Charley (Rod Steiger). Terry begins to feel pangs of conscience. When Joey's sister Edie (Eva Marie Saint) sees more in Terry than he sees in himself and Father Barry (Karl Malden) urges him on, Terry reassesses his past and begins to regain responsibility for his actions.
scene with Eva Marie Saint and Marlon Brando
This film - as wonderful a love story as it is! - was a way for Kazan to excuse himself for ratting on his friends (including Arthur Miller) during the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), led by Senator Joe McCarthy. . .
A View from the Bridge (1962)
Based on the Arthur Miller play
Directed by Sidney Lumet
A very hard to get film. . . thanks YouTube for making it available
Set in 1950s America, in an Italian American neighborhood near the Brooklyn Bridge in New York . . . the play, on which the film was based, was Miller's response to Elia Kazan's "On the Waterfront" (1954) and his naming communist party members during the McCarthy hearings.
If I remember correctly, it was filmed in Europe. . .
"A View from the Bridge tells the story of Eddie Carbone, a Brooklyn longshoreman, whose incestuous love for his niece drives him to his own destruction. Playwright Arthur Miller first heard the story while doing research in Red Hook, Brooklyn for a totally different project. It wasn't even a play. The celebrated director, Elia Kazan, Miller's long time friend and collaborator, had hired Miller to write a screenplay. It was to be called The Hook, and was supposed to expose all the corruption going down in the docks of Red Hook. It was a bad scene – evil mob bosses, corrupt union leaders, you name it. Miller didn't end up writing the screenplay, though, because his arch nemesis, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), led by Senator Joe McCarthy, pressured Columbia Pictures to turn the evil mob bosses into evil communists. Miller said, heck no, and quit the project. Kazan ended up going ahead with a different screenwriter. The film became the famous On the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando.
HUAC actually caused a lot more trouble for Miller. He was called before the committee and asked to name names of suspected communists. He refused and has been lauded by the artistic community ever since. Kazan was called too, but unlike Miller, he named names when asked to do so. This caused a major falling out between the two. They didn't work together again for many years after that.
<bnr> Some say that Miller and Kazan are metaphorically fighting it out with A View from the Bridge and On the Waterfront. In Miller's play the protagonist, Eddie, chooses to call Immigration on his wife's illegal cousins. He's reviled for this naming of names just like Kazan. In On the Waterfront, though, Marlon Brando's character, a dock worker like Eddie, ends up blowing a whistle on all the corruption. Unlike Eddie, when he names names he's viewed as a hero. Coincidence? We think not. . . " http://www.shmoop.com/view-from-the-bridge/
