Back in 2004, shortly after Marlon Brando died, I wrote this piece to honor him for his incredible performance in the movie “On the Waterfront,” a film that had a great impact on my life. Directed by Elia Kazan*, “On the Waterfront” was released originally in 1954, but I didn’t see it until many years later. The message of the movie is timeless, and was as impactful when I first saw it as the day it was released, and is still so today. If you have yet to see the film, I urge you to watch it as soon as you can. And I hope you enjoy, “To Terry Malloy,” my acknowledgement to a great film, a legendary actor, and an immortal performance…MA
__________________________
I heard that Marlon Brando died the other day. It always gives me pause when a well-known figure dies; kind of marks my own advancing time—these bodies don’t last forever. So, when I heard the news of Brando’s death, it made me think.
I wasn’t connected to Brando like I was to Frank Sinatra. When he died a few years ago, I shed a tear. I had become a big fan of Sinatra’s music in the mid 1990s, when I was already over forty; late in life, but I made up for lost time. With Marlon Brando my connection has a different quality. I have seen a lot of his movies; “The Godfather” of course, many times, and “The Wild One”, for which he became a cult figure, but which I thought was a bad movie—by which I mean boring. (to me, there is nothing worse for a movie than to be boring.) I became familiar with “A Streetcar Named Desire” when I played a few scenes in a college drama class, but never managed to sit all the way through it in a theatre or on TV. So, the quality of my connection to Brando was due to none of these. Instead, it was the character he played in “On the Waterfront”, that character named “Terry Malloy”, that seared its image into my consciousness as a 14-year-old kid and to this day has never left. That character has changed my life.
It was 1965. On a gray afternoon, probably a Sunday, I had a job mowing and trimming the lawn of one of the families in the old neighborhood. I came home after the job, and playing on the old black and white TV as I arrived was Brando and “Waterfront”. I sat down and started watching; within minutes becoming utterly entranced. The story concerns a corrupt longshore union in Hoboken, New Jersey, headed by the evil Johnny Friendly, and how one guy, a down on his luck ex-prize fighter named Terry Malloy, manages to bring Friendly and his mob down, at the same time discovering who he really is and thereby saving his soul. It’s a movie with a classic message and is loaded with timeless performances. Lee J. Cobb as the corrupt union boss, Johnny Friendly, literally personifies evil, and Karl Malden is great as the priest who comes to realize that his religion is more than just an hour-long retreat from the moral dilemmas of life once a week. Rod Steiger plays Terry’s older brother “Charlie,” who is Johnny Friendly’s right hand man. Charlie has lost himself completely in Friendly’s evil, a fate narrowly avoided by Terry. And Eva Marie Saint, in her acting debut, plays Terry’s love interest Edie, the sister of a friend of Terry’s who has been killed by the mob with Terry’s unwitting assistance. In her effort to find who killed her brother Edie meets Terry; her pure goodness, counterpoint to the evil Terry is immersed in every day, starts forcing him to confront his role in the death of his friend. In one heart-rending scene he tells Edie of his involvement in her brother’s death, and from that point on he more and more establishes a moral high ground; ultimately recovering himself and his viewpoint.
In one climactic scene, one of the most famous in movie history, Terry is riding in a cab with his brother Charlie. They are supposedly on their way to Madison Square Garden, but in reality Charlie has been ordered to kill Terry if he cannot convince him to drop his relationship with Edie and not rat out the mob to the crime commission investigating Friendly and his cronies. In this scene, Terry confronts Charlie with his responsibility in getting Terry to throw a fight that, had he won, he would have gotten a title shot. Instead, in throwing the fight, Terry got a “one way ticket to Palookaville” as he describes it. With his brother unwilling to play ball, Charlie pulls a gun on him, but in the end cannot pull the trigger. Consequently, Charlie pays with his own life; Terry finding him shot to death and hanging from a hook in an alley. Vowing to kill Johnny Friendly, Terry then goes to find him, but in doing so encounters the priest (Malden), who convinces Terry to handle it legally by testifying to the crime commission, which in the end Terry does, thus bringing down Friendly and the corrupt union.
“On the Waterfront” is about integrity. More than that, it shows that a person can recover their integrity, even after having lost it, and that the process of doing that involves confronting; being responsible for what you have done, and, in the process, discovering who you really are. To a fourteen-year-old seeing it for the first time, the film made a major impact. Since that day I have seen the movie over 30 times. I imagine it must be like going to see the “Mona Lisa” again and again—always something new; a nuance not before appreciated; a message not before received. It’s a movie that fully lives up to the definition of art—“the quality of communication”—and I have appreciated it on so many levels. I can still see my old friend Chuck Leggott, after a couple of beers, doing his Brando imitation of Terry’s lines in the famous car scene with Charlie. Or my current friend, Rick Nelson, doing those same lines in his own inimitable Brando style. (Sorry Rick, Chuck’s ‘Brando’ was better)
And a hundred years from now, at some party somewhere, someone will still be saying to his friends in their best Brando, “I coulda been somebody…I coulda been a contendah!”
And so, here’s to you Marlon Brando! I thank you for your contribution to my life. And no matter where you are now, you can look back at your life just lived, and know that you did something great.
And here’s to Terry Malloy!
May his message live forever!
*Elia Kazan (1909-2003)—Described by no less than Stanley Kubrick as, “without question, the best director we have in America, [and] capable of performing miracles with the actors he uses,” Elia Kazan was one of the most influential directors in movie and Broadway history. His classic films include “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “On the Waterfront,” directing Brando in both, and “East of Eden” in which he introduced James Dean. Because of his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952 (the time of the Hollywood Blacklist), his career was tainted by political controversy right up to the time of his death. Nevertheless, as “On the Waterfront” demonstrates, the guy could make a great movie!
