I like what I am reading here. Hey, do drop by at my website if you…

you’re both right.

Rather than “stick-it-to-the-man,” I would call On the Waterfront the most moving defense of informing ever made. I’m not sure if this stuff will make it into the final version of my first chapter, so here you go:

“IT’S INTERESTING HOW THE MINUTE WE TRY TO MAKE THE SCRIPT PRO-AMERICAN YOU PULL OUT” (qtd. in Miller, Timebends, 308). Harry Cohn’s 1951 telegram to Arthur Miller punctuated the dissolution of Miller’s and Elia Kazan’s latest project, The Hook, a film inspired in part by journalist Malcolm Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into organized crime and the longshoreman’s union. A Brooklyn native, Miller had become distracted by the story during his long walks through the adjacent Red Hook waterfront district, and, in particular, he recognized great dramatic potential in the recent disappearance of a dock worker who had stood up notoriously to the New York mob-influenced International Longshoreman’s Association. Once transformed by fiction, his hero would be, as Miller wrote in his notebook, “the genuinely moral man. . . . It’s as though a hand had been laid upon him, making him the rebel, pressing him toward a collision with everything that is established and accepted” (qtd. in Gottfried 168). For Miller and Kazan both, The Hook would be one more opportunity to publicly interrogate the corrupting influence of America’s postwar capitalist values, as the two had so famously done already in All My Sons and Death of a Salesman.

By the time it reached Harry Cohn, head of production at Columbia Pictures, Miller’s script had already been rejected by Twentieth Century-Fox, Kazan’s home studio. But Cohn, an old union man himself and one eager to capitalize on Miller’s and Kazan’s recent critical and commercial successes, agreed to finance the project on one condition: “I just have to check it with the FBI” (Miller, Timebends 305). Cohn in fact handed the script to Roy Brewer, who was not only a prominent figure in Hollywood’s unions and a close friend of the very leaders villanized by Miller’s script, but was also chairman of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAPAI), an influential anticommunist organization headed by John Wayne. Predictably, Brewer denied the influence of racketeers on labor and deemed The Hook unpatriotic. His recommendation to Cohn was that the film instead expose the real problem: communist infiltration of the longshoremen’s union. According to Kazan, Brewer suggested that Miller show “in the strongest possible way you can that [the hero] does not represent the so-called progressives” (qtd. in Gottfried 176). Despite Kazan’s urgings, Miller abandoned the project; Kazan would reteam with Cohn three years later, directing Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, another script inspired by Johnson’s reportage.

The language of Cohn’s telegram is revealing. By critiquing the machinery of capital, even if metaphorically, Miller’s script was necessarily unpatriotic; a revised, anticommunist version would necessarily be “Pro-American”; and anyone unwilling to recognize that distinction would necessarily be marginalized as “interesting,” or suspect. Written within months of the Rosenberg sentencing and barely four years after HUAC first opened its Hollywood hearings, Cohn’s memo exemplifies the mighty influence exercised by both the House committee and, in their stead, by groups like the MPAPAI. Careers had already been destroyed by the blacklists, particular films would be undone by organized public protests—witness the American Legion’s boycott of Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight in 1952—and, amid this rabidly anticommunist milieu, Miller would soon emerge as arguably America’s most prominent public intellectual of the much-battered Left. Through his highly publicized break with Kazan, precipitated by his old friend’s decision to “name names”; through his next two major plays, The Crucible and A View from the Bridge; and through his own testimony before HUAC in 1956, Miller cultivated the not-unproblematic personae of “liberal activist,” joining the likes of Dwight Macdonald, Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and I. F. Stone. Such public intellectuals, as Richard Pells notes, “resisted not simply the tactics of but the rationale for McCarthyism” (265). Miller would, in effect, enact the role of his favorite hero: the “genuinely moral man” who rebels against the monolith of “modernized” America.

And from several pages later . . .

When he received his summons, Arthur Miller was living near Reno, Nevada, where he was establishing residency in order to finalize his divorce [from his first wife]. In the three years since the premiere of The Crucible, Miller had written two one-act plays, A Memory of Two Mondays, inspired by his one-year stint as a worker in an auto parts warehouse, and A View from the Bridge. The latter has been treated by most critics as Miller’s response to On the Waterfront, which premiered in American movie houses in 1954. Featuring memorable performances from the stable of New York actors who had helped to make Miller and Kazan famous, including Marlon Brando, Lee J. Cobb, and Karl Malden, the film is a defense of informers, substituting the Waterfront Crime Commission for HUAC, and Brando’s brave simpleton, Terry Malloy, for Kazan, Cobb, Schulberg, and everyone else who had chosen to name names. On the Waterfront proved to be, in many ways, a vindication for Kazan, as it won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

and lindbergh was awarded a freaking nazi medal by goering, himself! a medal he never gave back, even when we went to war.

You know, I’ve never thought of this until right now, but what if Kazan HATED Dalton Trumbo’s guts? What if Trumbo was a terrible frickin’ person? I’m not a relativist, but I do seek to understand, which I didn’t always do.

And, “Bigger Prick Cage Match” is a cartoon just waitin’ to happen.

Did you all know that Kazan actually testified twice? The first session was closed, and the transcripts, which were made available fairly recently, reveal that he refused to name names. Had some prick not squealed about the session to the press, thereby putting tons of pressure on the committee and on the studio heads Kazan was working for, he wouldn’t have been called back. I’m not excusing his public testimony, mind you, but I would have stood for him at the Oscars a couple years ago.

The liberal hero, Arthur Miller, wasn’t called to testify until several years later, when most of the heat had already cooled. In fact, had he agreed to allow Marilyn to have her photo with the committee chair, he wouldn’t have been asked to testify at all.

In a Lindbergh/Kazan cage match, Lindbergh wins Bigger Prick every time.

I’m just saying . . .