I cover the Waterfront

From that startling first image of handful of men exiting a shack, dwarfed by a colossal ship, to the final bloodied Christ-like stumble of the unlikely hero toward the man in the coat hollering everyone to work, there is in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) a steady pulse of the extraordinary. We’re not watching a merely great movie but a transformative one, and that transformation, so layered, complex and electric, is something I believe viewers can sense even without a deep knowledge of film history. This is high drama and gritty realism, a moral tale mired in moral ambiguity. It went aggressively against the aesthetic, commercial and ideological grain of its times—and still won eight Oscars, including Best Picture.

Criterion’s new edition of On the Waterfront is among their most heavily supplemented releases—with good reason. Even after his death, Kazan remains contentious on every front, one of Hollywood’s enduring enigmas: his immigrant background and roots in the Group Theatre; his co-founding of the Actor’s Studio and his ushering of a new wave of actors into the movies; his cooperation with the House Committee of Un-American Activities that destroyed so many careers during the peak of the Red Scare. The film, which concerns a dockworker who testifies against a corrupt union boss, has often been read by many as a defense of Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg’s naming names to HUAC. Among Criterion’s most interesting supplements is the documentary Elia Kazan: An Outsider (1982), shot by the great Québécois cinematographer Michel Brault, in which, decades after the HUAC hearings, Kazan still seems over-eager to justify his actions through a complicated set of circumstantial explanations. In another excellent supplement, produced by Criterion, the critic David Thomson offers his own compelling explanation for Kazan’s choice to name names, even when he knew it would make him an object of considerable scorn in the industry for the rest of his life: “I think that it really came out of a psychological need to be an outsider.” (This same documentary features commentary from scholar Lisa Dombrowski, a welcome addition to Criterion's pantheon of critics. She wrote an excellent book on Sam Fuller a few years back that I can't recommend enough.) 

The film’s outsider is, of course, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), a disgraced ex-boxer, now dockworker, who begins the story as the darling of Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) the lethal union leader with mob ties, and ends it as Friendly’s enemy. On the Waterfront has a dizzying number of wonderful performances, but those of Brando and Cobb make for the strongest contrast because they’re both so damned good, yet so different. Cobb, at times genuinely fearsome, eating with his mouth open, eyes darting around a room as he lectures Terry, gives a gutsy, gorgeous performance, but he’s also a bulldozer, shouting his way through key moments.

Brando meanwhile is a fountain of nuance, seemingly hyper-masculine yet so vulnerable, even effeminate in his tenderness—along with Monty Clift and James Dean, his stardom would instigate an attack on Hollywood gender stereotypes from the male perspective. (And Jesus is he ever handsome here.) In that early scene where Terry realizes he set up a fellow dockworker for murder, he seems caught off guard by his own guilt, absently clutches at himself as though in response to acid reflex. Later he’ll chew gum as a way of transmitting thought. He’s comical, yet touchingly earnest in his scenes with Eva Marie Saint—which are to me the best scenes in the movie—shoving his paw in her little white glove, saying lines like “I don’t like the country, the crickets make me nervous.” Brando does some shouting as well, but behind the shouting there is an almost palpable net of impulse, a psychological busyness, none of it decoration. Brando is a revelation here, and his approach brought out the best in his co-stars, Saint most of all, who is the picture of innocence, yet also feisty, yet also uncertain, yet also fascinated with Brando with a nascent eroticism that rises to the surface in unexpected ways. Crazy to think that this is the same actress who just a few years later would be the sophisticated, sexy Hitchcock blonde in North By Northwest (1959). 

What else? Boris Kaufman’s bleak and sumptuous cinematography, Leonard Bernstein’s intrusive yet stunningly beautiful score—a way of telling the story all on its own. I love Bernstein's score, but half wish I could take it out of the movie and just hear the sounds of Hoboken and water, and wintry gasped breaths. But I'll draw this to a close. Just take my word for it: Criterion has given us the best possible home video experience of On the Waterfront, a singular masterpiece from Hollywood’s great transitional decade—and it rewards investigation into who made it, how it works, and how it came to be. 

    

Haunted by memories of sea, snow, asbestos and orphans: Criterion reminds Canada that its cinema is worth celebrating

I’ve always been more than happy to reside in a country whose citizenry is, by any standard, not especially nationalistic. Yet a frustrating byproduct of our collective patriotic shrug, our amiable reluctance to self-congratulate, is a chronic habit of failing to recognize homegrown talent until celebrated elsewhere—and even then! This is certainly the case with regards to our endlessly maligned—or more to the point, shat on—national cinema: how else to explain the US-based Criterion Collection’s new gorgeously packaged, smartly supplemented prestige releases of, first, arguably one of the finest, if not the finest Canadian film of all time, one that was previously difficult to get hold of on DVD, and that most moviegoers, at least in English Canada, have never seen, and second, one of the very best recent works from a guy who we might at least describe as Canada’s most deliriously distinctive, decidedly demented auteur, one whose work is lauded to a far greater degree in the US and Europe than in his own country?

The first, which a few of you smartypanty Canadian film students may have guessed, is Claude Jutra’s Mon Oncle Antoine (1971), a hauntingly lyrical child’s eye view of eros, community dynamics, corruption and death in 1940s rural Quebec, a work that bears comparison to the best of Louis Malle. Drawn from the childhood memories of co-scripter Clément Perron—relayed to Jutra during an extended drinking session meant to assuage Perron’s hurt feelings over Jutra’s rejection of another screenplay—the film sparkles with details that spill forth from the firmament of deep memory: rosary beards being tangled free from a dead man’s unforgiving fingers; shelves lined with packaged products from some alien, more sophisticated world; an exotic notary’s wife entering a crowded store as an explosion erupts from the mine some distance behind her. This film’s greatness so clearly goes against the oft-farted about notion that Canadian films must generalize their settings to be accessible to a global public: the enduring splendour of Jutra’s lost world lies firmly in its specificity and faithfulness.

Set in a village where the Anglo-owned asbestos mine has coated the landscape and lungs of its citizenry with poison, the story revolves around a pair of deaths, the first of which effects little more than morbid thrills in young Benoit (the brilliantly artless Jacques Gagnon), while the second ushers him toward a more intimate understanding of human frailty, confusion, and, during his uncle’s drunken confession of despair over a coffin accidentally dropped in the snowy woods, a very Quebecois tendency toward despair coated in workingman’s strident joviality. Yet Mon Oncle Antoine could never be mistaken for a somber, unhappy film. It’s rife with the wonder of trespassing into adult realms of lust, and Jean Cousineau’s beautiful, stately score for violin and accordion envelops the richly hued imagery, courtesy of legendary cinematographer Michel Brault—like Jutra, sufficiently well versed in documentary to know how to capture the hidden magic of the everyday—with a delicate, wistful ache.

Criterion’s two-disc set is designed as much as a primer on Jutra as anything else, its highlight being Claude Jutra: An Unfinished Story, a 2002 documentary by Jutra’s friend and colleague Paule Baillargeon, featuring intimate interviews with Brault, Bernardo Bertolucci, Geneviève Bujold and Saul Rubinek. Though Baillargeon’s approach is at times precious—especially her whispery voice-over—her weaving together of Jutra’s own work with testimonies from collaborators and critics culminates in something absolutely heartbreaking. While still in his 50s, this poet of memory, obsessed throughout his life with the mysteries of water, was afflicted with Alzheimer’s. He disappeared one day, and was eventually found washed up on the banks of the St. Lawrence. A piece of paper tucked into his clothing read: “I am Claude Jutra.”

I’ll say less about the second film, if only because it's more recent and has gotten plenty of commentary from the likes of me already. Concerning a young man’s return to the lighthouse orphanage where he grew up under an oppressive, all-seeing matriarch and zombified inventor dad, Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain! (2006), a hysterical hybrid of silent movie aesthetics, grand guignol, teen detective novels and lovingly embellished autobiography, dazzled audiences the world over in theatrically accented screenings featuring live orchestra, foley, and narration from a dizzying variety of celebrity voices. In Criterion’s gorgeous transfer, it’s still pretty damn good even on your TV, where you can choose to have either Maddin, Isabella Rossellini, Laurie Anderson, John Ashbery, Crispin Glover, Louis Negin or Eli Wallach be your aural guide.

The extras are also great, especially Dennis Lim’s essay and ‘Footsteps,’ Maddin’s short doc that captures the foley artists at work in their studio, rifling through plastic baskets of chains, antlers, shoes and phones. These adventuresome audioaholics, clad in white lab coats, turn big wheels, splash water, ride sawhorses and kiss a horse’s ass to simulate a woman kissing a man’s ass. This job looks like too much fun! Even better however is 97 Percent True, a new doc that’s half about the making of Brand and half just about Maddin’s development as an artist, featuring expansive, top shelf quottage from the always witty Maddin and his co-scripter George Toles. It easily betters the previously released Maddin profile Waiting for Twilight (1997).