The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Elia Kazan · a film · 1954 · about 108 minutes · written by Budd Schulberg · in English
Mode
Social drama and crime film shot on location; a conversion told from the outside of a man who cannot explain himself
Mythos
The passion and the via dolorosa; the brother who is his brother’s keeper and sold him; the fallen champion; the betrayer who becomes a witness; the dove and the stool pigeon in one bird
Phase
One winter on the docks, from a killing on a tenement roof to a beaten man walking into the pier shed
Presentation
Feature film, about 108 minutes, black and white, mono, in English; Boris Kaufman’s location photography, Leonard Bernstein’s score, a lead played from inside
Register
Grey water, breath and smoke; courtship in fragments and silences, a sermon over a dead man, a confession under a ship’s whistle
Scale
One man, his brother, a girl and a priest, and a waterfront owned by the men who hire on it
Governing Proposition
A former prizefighter who runs errands for the mob that owns the docks helps, without knowing it, to kill a man who meant to testify, and over one winter comes to know what he did and what was done to him. The wager of the film is that a community can be bound to the men who rob it by a silence it holds as its own honour, that a man bought cheaply learns at last that what he sold was himself, and that this can be shown through a face and a pair of hands rather than said.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with an errand. Terry Malloy, a former prizefighter who runs small jobs for the men who control the union on the Hoboken docks, calls a neighbour, Joey Doyle, up to the roof of a tenement, and Joey is thrown from it. Terry did not know that this was what he was helping to do. Everything that follows is Terry finding out what he did, and what it means.
The film was made in the winter of 1953 to 1954 on the waterfront itself, across the river from New York. Elia Kazan directed it, from a screenplay by Budd Schulberg developed out of Malcolm Johnson’s series on crime on the New York docks in the New York Sun of 1948 and 1949. Sam Spiegel produced it for Horizon Pictures, and Columbia released it in 1954. Boris Kaufman photographed it in black and white, Gene Milford cut it, Richard Day designed it, and Leonard Bernstein wrote its score, his only original score for a film. It runs about 108 minutes.
Marlon Brando plays Terry; Eva Marie Saint, Joey’s sister Edie; Karl Malden, Father Barry; Lee J. Cobb, Johnny Friendly, who runs the local; Rod Steiger, Terry’s brother Charley, who works for Friendly. The world is set out in the first minutes: grey water, breath and smoke, rooftops above the harbour, and a community that knows who killed Joey and will not say.
Movement II
Work on the docks is given out each morning at the shape-up: the men stand in a crowd and are hired by token, and a token is tossed into the crowd. The economy is concrete and the film shows it plainly: the loan shark, the kickback, the cut the boss takes from every load, and the bodies that end in the river. This was news when the film was made, and it is shown as news, without ornament.
Father Barry calls a meeting in the basement of his church, and Friendly’s men break it up. On the roof Terry keeps pigeons, and he tends them with a care he has for nothing else; he names the hawks that take them. The roof is his one place of tenderness, and the film will make it the place of his punishment too.
The code is the waterfront’s own honour. Not to speak is to belong; to speak is to betray one’s own. The men who are robbed hold the silence as theirs, and the priest, who wants them to speak, is an outsider in his own parish until he leaves his church for the pier. Kaufman’s frame is crowded and cold, and in it a man who might speak stands apart from everyone around him.
Movement III
Terry walks Edie through a park. She drops a glove, and he picks it up and keeps it, and works it onto his own hand while he talks, so that she must stay to get it back. He has no words for care, and he practises it with his hands. Brando plays the scene with half-finished sentences, chewing gum, looking away; Saint answers him in the same register. It is a courtship in fragments, among swings and a fence, and the film has nothing tenderer.
There is a wedding and a bar, and Edie’s father, who wants her out of the waterfront, and the slow turning of Terry toward her and away from Friendly. Then Kayo Dugan, who has agreed to testify, is killed in the hold of a ship. Father Barry comes down into the hold and preaches over the body while things are thrown at him, and names Christ in the shape-up. The body is lifted out on a hook. Faith has been made a waterfront argument, and the man who would testify has paid as Joey paid.
Terry tells Edie what he did. He tells her on a hill above the harbour, and a ship’s whistle drowns his confession; she puts her hands over her ears. The film does not let the audience hear the words either. The truth is spoken on this waterfront where it cannot be heard, and the form of the scene is its meaning.
Movement IV
The brothers ride in the back of a taxi. Charley has a gun, and Terry pushes it down with his hand, as though pushing away grief. Then Terry names the past: the fight that was fixed, and the bargain made for him by his own brother. “I coulda had class.”
The scene is played without a raised voice, and it is the hinge of the film. The fixed fight is family history and the racket’s method at once: Charley sold his brother, and Terry learns in a taxi that what was sold was himself, that he was never let to be anyone. Charley lets him go. The brother who was his keeper chooses, at the end, to die for it.
Charley’s body is found on a hook. Terry kicks down Edie’s door. The archetype under the plot is old, the brothers, one the keeper who sold the other and then dies for it, and the film has built it into the plot rather than laid it over.
Movement V
Terry testifies before the Waterfront Crime Commission. The hearing is procedure, and the film gives it as procedure. When he comes home, the birds on his roof are dead, killed by a boy. The dove and the stool pigeon have been one bird all along, and the punishment for speaking is served on the one thing he cared for.
He goes down to the dock in the morning to shape up for work. He and Friendly fight on the dock, and Terry is beaten badly while the men watch. He gets to his feet and walks, barely, into the pier shed, while Friendly shouts on the dock behind him, and the men fall in behind Terry and go in to work. The end is staged as passion and procession: a beaten man on his feet, a walk watched by a crowd, the work resumed in his name.
The film won eight Academy Awards for 1954, among them Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actress, Story and Screenplay, Cinematography and Editing, and it has been argued over ever since: whether it is a defence of informing made by men who informed before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, whether the walk is a triumph or a new servitude to a new boss, whether Terry’s conscience is his own or the priest’s. What it has made is a performance and a disclosure in one: a man who cannot say what he knows, shown knowing it, on a waterfront where the truth is told under a whistle.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test and the spine resists it. The opening killing is the one Terry did not know he was helping, and everything after is his finding out what he did: Edie’s grief, the priest, the brother. Dugan’s death is required, since it proves that testifying gets a man killed and so makes Terry’s choice cost something real. The taxi is the hinge, where the past is named and the brother chooses to die for it. The roof and its birds are required twice, as Terry’s one place of care and as the form of his punishment. What gives is small: the sermon in the hold says at length what the film has shown, the hearing is procedure, and the wedding and the bar carry atmosphere.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a community bound to the men who rob it by a code of silence it holds as its own honour, so that to tell the truth is to betray one’s own; and a man bought cheaply who learns that what he sold was himself. The brothers’ scene states the second half as clearly as any American film, the fixed fight and the bargain made for him, the sense that he was never let to be anyone. The dock economy is concrete and was news: the shape-up, the loan shark, the kickback, the bodies in the river. The limit is the film’s hand on its truth. Informing is made the whole of conscience, and the union is reduced to a gang.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Elevation is frequent and mostly warm. The glove in the park, Terry working it onto his own hand while he talks so that she must stay to get it back, is tenderness in a hard world that few films match. The taxi rises to grief without a raised voice, Terry’s hand pushing the gun away. The hill, where his confession is drowned by a ship’s whistle and her hands go over her ears, is sublime in the full sense: the truth told and not heard. What holds the axis among the lowest of the twelve is how some of the height is reached. Bernstein’s score pushes elevation the images do not need, and the last walk is staged as passion and procession, so that its height is partly asserted.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The myth is built, not evoked. The passion is load-bearing: Father Barry names Christ over Dugan’s body in the hold, and the end is a via dolorosa, a beaten man on his feet, a walk watched by the crowd, the work resumed in his name. Beneath it older patterns are worked into the plot: the brothers, one the keeper who sold the other and then dies for it; the fallen champion who might have been; the betrayer who becomes a witness, Judas turned to Peter. The pigeons carry the dove and the stool pigeon in one bird. The particular stays particular: a token tossed into the crowd, a cheap glove. The limit: the Christian frame is announced by the priest, and underlined at the close.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance is the American social problem picture and the location crime film of the late 1940s, Kazan’s own path among them: Boomerang! (1947) and Panic in the Streets (1950) had taken his camera out of the studio, and A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) had put Brando’s acting on the screen. The departures are real: a prestige picture made of a real waterfront in winter, with dock workers in the background; a hero inarticulate, guilty, half-bought and not very bright, played from inside; a love story conducted in fragments and silences. The stake was an independent production put on location in a hard season. It meets the bar and no more: the turn joins paths already opened, and the moral shape is an old conversion story.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The story is shaped as a conversion told from the outside of a man who cannot explain himself, so the viewer learns Terry’s interior through behaviour, the glove, the birds, his hands in the taxi, and not through speech; the performance and the location photography are the instruments of that knowledge, not its dress. The confession drowned by the whistle is the form making the point that truth on this waterfront is spoken where it cannot be heard. Kaufman’s grey, crowded frame makes the community’s pressure physical, so that conscience is a man standing apart in a packed image. The cost: the hearing and the sermons carry in words what the form had no need of.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Seventy-two years of return are evidence, and the film yields in two ways. As a performance it is studied without end: the taxi and the park are taught as the moment American screen acting changed, and each viewing finds more in Brando’s evasions. Morally the film has never settled: whether it is a defence of informing made by men who informed, whether the end is triumph or a new servitude to a new boss, whether Terry’s conscience is his own or the priest’s. That quarrel has kept it alive. What holds the axis: once the political frame is seen, readings tend to gather around it, and the dock world and the love story yield less on return than the performance does.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Released in 1954, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1950s. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation: the film made the inward, behavioural acting of the New York stage the centre of a prestige Hollywood picture, and joined it to location realism and a working-class subject, changing what an American film performance and an American social film could be. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: eight Academy Awards; the performance as the standard for a generation of American actors, Dean, Newman, De Niro and Pacino among them; the speech in the taxi quoted and restaged, at length in Raging Bull; the corrupt union and the informing witness as a lasting American plot. Streetcar began the change; this film carried it furthest.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The film as released survives complete and has been restored; the aspect ratio in which it is shown varies, which is variance, not loss. Presence has been continuous for seventy-two years: repertory, television, teaching, and lines that have passed into common speech among people who have not seen the film. The surface carries a charge. The Catholic social mission, the shape-up and the crime commission are of their moment and age as history, the smaller charge; the larger is that the film’s moral argument is tied to the blacklist and read through it, and the piety of the end has dated more than the brothers in the taxi. That holds it a tenth below the film cap.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight. Brando’s performance is among the most fully commanded in the medium: the gum, the glove, the half-finished sentences, the taxi played as a man pushing grief away. Steiger, Cobb, Malden and Saint are held to one register. Kaufman’s photography of Hoboken in winter, breath and smoke and grey water, the rooftops above the harbour, is exact; Schulberg’s script is economical and its idiom right; Gene Milford’s cutting is clean. The costs: Bernstein’s score, brilliant in itself and superb in the opening horn and percussion, often overstates and at times swamps the dialogue; Malden’s sermons are played at the pitch of a stage; the final fight and walk are staged rather than seen.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the glove in the park, a small courtship among swings and a fence, and the sermon in the hold, a priest preaching over a dead man while things are thrown at him. One law governs both: on this waterfront every bond, love, kinship, faith and labour, is held under the eye of the men who own the docks, and every act of care is a risk. The pigeons obey it, the brothers obey it, Edie’s door obeys it, and the range it covers runs from courtship to murder to liturgy. The world keeps its weather, idiom and pressures from the first killing to the last walk. The strain is at the close, where the law of the place gives way to the law of the parable.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders are held in one structure, and joined. Labour: the shape-up, the token, the hold, the loading and the boss’s cut. The state: the crime commission and its investigators, and its absence everywhere else on the docks. Crime as an economy. The church, in a priest who leaves his church for the pier. The family, in the brothers and in Edie’s father, who wants her out of it. Love. Sport and its corruption, in the fixed fight, which is the brothers’ story and the racket’s method at once. Consciousness, in a man coming to know what he did. What holds the axis among the lowest: the city beyond the docks is barely present, nature is weather and birds, and the other inner lives are drawn in less than his.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment, The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition at 8.9. A disclosure that can be stated and holds, of a silence kept as honour and a man who learns he sold himself; a passion and a pair of brothers built into the plot rather than laid over it; and a performance that joined the inward acting of the stage to a location social film and became the standard for a generation.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 8.3: the glove, the taxi and the hill reach the height, but the score pushes elevation the images do not need, and the last walk asserts part of its height. Level with it, The Encompassed at 8.3: labour, the state, crime, the church, the family, love and sport are joined in one plot, while the city beyond the docks, nature and history beyond one winter are barely present.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Archetypal Deep at 8.9, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 and The Imperishable at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve meets it exactly at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis falls below 8.3, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.7 from a sum of 103.8, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of On the Waterfront as released in 1954, the American theatrical version, black and white, mono, about 108 minutes, from the killing on the roof to the walk into the pier shed: directed by Elia Kazan from a screenplay by Budd Schulberg, developed from Malcolm Johnson’s newspaper series in the New York Sun (1948 to 1949), produced by Sam Spiegel for Horizon Pictures and released by Columbia Pictures, photographed by Boris Kaufman, edited by Gene Milford, with art direction by Richard Day and music by Leonard Bernstein. There is no rival cut; the aspect ratio in which the film is shown varies, and nothing is judged on it. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. One line of dialogue is quoted, held certain; other speech is described. The director’s testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities is part of the film’s record and of the quarrel over it; the work is judged on what is on the screen. Details that could not be verified, among them the number of scenes, the history of the project before it reached its producer, the way the frame was composed for different ratios, and how the taxi scene was built and shot, are not given.