The New Pictures

On the Waterfront (Horizon; Columbia) is an attempt by a master director, Elia Kazan, to develop heroic, classic-style drama out of dockside thuggery and union corruption. Kazan succeeds in producing a shrewd piece of screen journalism, a melodrama in the grand manner of Public Enemy and Little Caesar. But he fails to do anything more serious--largely because he tries too hard. In searching for the general meaning in little lives, Director Kazan has trained his lens down fine on small events; he has too often watched his characters through the magnifying glass of special prejudice--the old sentimental prejudice that ordinary people are wonderful no matter what they do.

On the Waterfront has a script that is a work of love and shows it. To the facts presented in Malcolm Johnson's 1949 Pulitzer Prizewinning stories on the New York waterfront (in the late New York Sun), Novelist Budd Schulberg (The Disenchanted) added the results of his own investigations. The product strikes the raucous but curiously subtle pitch of the great port as surely as an octet of harmonizing tugboats.

The mainspring of the action is a murder. A leader of the opposition to a brutal labor czar is cut down before he can testify against the tyrant (Lee J. Cobb). The Orestean hero (Marlon Brando), an ex-pug who has--not quite unwittingly--served as bait in the murder trap, is pursued by the Furies of remorse in the singularly amiable form of the dead man's sister (Eva Marie Saint) and in the sterner shape of a waterfront priest (Karl Maiden).

For a while his fear of reprisal and the herd-honor speak more strongly than his love for the girl and the first dull prickings of conscience. Then one night he finds his own big brother (Rod Steiger), the legal lieutenant of the union boss, dead in an alley because he stood up for junior. And so the ways are greased that send the picture sliding into a blood bath of the sort moviegoers will be wiping off their memories for days.

Brando in this show is one glorious meathead. The gone look, the reet vocabulary and the sexual arrogance are still the Brando brand of behavior. But for once the mannerisms converge, like symptoms, to point out the nature of the man who has them. The audience may never forget that Brando is acting, but it will know that he is doing a powerful acting job.

Beside this almost massive performance, the others, even though good, seem a little small. Rod Steiger, as the brother, is, to the life, the kind of Irish bright boy who can get a little too smart for himself. Eva Marie Saint is quite right, too, in her convent-kept freshness, as the kind of narrow little good girl the bad boys long to be redeemed by. Karl Maiden is bulldoggish as the priest, but hardly conveys the earthy sagacity of the living models the part was drawn from.

The excellent acting, however, is surpassed by Boris Kaufman's photography. Seldom has the brick implacability of a workingman's neighborhood stood staring in such an honest light--the tenement phalanx, the sad little parks, the ugly churches. And coloring it all is the pale chemical air of the big city. Over the docks in the morning, when the longshoremen gather stamping in the cold for the daily shape-up, washes the pale fog from the Hudson. And as the men gather, and dissolve, and arrange again, their faces settle into friezes as noble and grave as any ever painted on a tomb.

Hollywood has several kinds of producers: those who work for the big studios, mostly on assignment; shoestring producers, who work for themselves and would sometimes profit more by producing shoestrings instead of pictures; and top-drawer independents, usually identifiable by their imagination, willingness to gamble on offbeat stories--and for a slightly hunted look because they never know where their next million is coming from.

Sam Spiegel, one of the top independents, has all the characteristics except the hunted look. Since he launched The African Queen, directed by John Huston and starring Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart (TIME, Feb. 25, 1952), Spiegel has had little trouble in lining up his financing; all he need do now is exercise his facility for latching on to a good script, director and cast. His latest catch: On the Waterfront (see above).

Austrian-born Sam Spiegel, 50, came to the U.S. in 1927 as a lecturer on European drama at the University of California. In a year or so, he was in the movie business; his first U.S. film, an episodic story called Tales of Manhattan, was produced in 1942. It was then that he made a semipermanent change in his name. "We were sitting in the steam room at 20th Century-Fox," he explains, "and someone said there shouldn't be quite so many foreign names [on Tales of Manhattan]. There wasn't one good English name on it. They started it as a joke and said: 'Why don't we take your name and cut it down to S. P. Eagle?' For a while thereafter, I was S. P. Eagle."

Filming On the Waterfront in the New York dock area gave Eagle-Spiegel some of the biggest headaches of his career. When the company rented five adjacent tenement rooftops in Hoboken. the landlord of building No. 3 decided he wanted more money. At first Spiegel tried to fight by shooting around No. 3, but finally "everybody compromised," i.e., the landlord got his money. At another point, Spiegel hired a saloon for nighttime shooting at $150 a night; after one evening's shooting, the saloon owner raised his fee to close to $1,000. Spiegel, committed to the set, had to shell out again. Word soon got around that Spiegel was a walking mint, and there was no stopping scores of eager petty grafters and local officials who drifted on to the set for rake-offs. In all, this monetary soup kitchen added an extra $30,000 to the Waterfront budget. Says Spiegel in astonishment: "We never had this trouble when we were filming The African Queen . . . But the princes in Africa are lesser blackguards than they are in some places on the waterfront."

Now that the film is released, Spiegel is off to Venice, where his picture will be shown at the annual film festival. "The Italians like this movie," he says. "The festival chairman told me that Waterfront is the first Italian film made in America."

Apache (Hecht-Lancaster; United Artists) claims to follow in the bootsteps of High Noon and Shane, but it trips along the way. It stars Burt Lancaster in a fairly closeup view of the Indian brave, Massai, who refused to join Geronimo in a peace contract with the U.S. Army. The old chief and his warriors are shipped off to Florida reservations, but Massai escapes and decides to go it alone.

Back in Arizona Territory, Massai continues his one-man war against the Army and even the Indians who remain there. This story line gives onetime Circus-Acrobat Lancaster plenty of opportunities to leap daringly from crag to crag, horse to horse, and frying pan to fire. In time everybody is after him, but the one to catch him first is Nalinle (Jean Peters), whose object is squawhood. Together they build a little mountain hideout and plant some corn. When Army scouts find them, Massai, Nalinle and their brand-new papoose prove too homey a family to break up, so Massai goes free. How the scouts straighten out this arbitrary law enforcement with headquarters will have to wait for the sequel, to be titled, no doubt, Son of Apache.

Ernest Laszlo's photography and Robert Aldrich's direction help make the film appear a little grander than it really is. There are some fine shots of a realistic Indian village and of hazy plains and sawtooth mountains. Good scene: Massai's bewilderment as he wanders through the streets of bustling 1886 St. Louis, eying such strange sights as a player piano, a fire wagon, women in bustles.

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