The Most Dangerous Thing

Like fire, truth is often a deadly and indiscriminate thing. 

Difficult to control, once it is let loose it can burn the guilty and innocent alike, and in many cases, there is no stopping its warm proliferation until the thing itself gives up and dies on its own accord. These Pyrrhic attributes of truth, along with what people choose to do with it and how that decision impacts their lives, has never been depicted on film with as much accuracy, skill and gusto as in Elia Kazan's 1954 masterpiece On the Waterfront.

Set among organized crime and corruption in a New York dockworkers union, the film masterfully juggles the destructive and rejuvenatory power of truth by following the complicated odyssey of Terry Malloy, a washed-up boxer on the docks who is forced to deal with maze of complicated loyalties, conflicting emotions and moral choices that are all well beyond his intellectual and psychological means. 

It is an interesting twist, in the sense that the contemporary audience member is more accustomed to watching Mafia pictures from the perspective of the Mob. In those films, the drama lies in witnessing the depravity of the criminal mind and in exploring the crime world's compromised system of morals. In contrast, this picture forces the viewer to confront the moral dilemmas faced by the Mob's victims, all of whom are workingclass and interested in little more than making a living, staying alive and hanging on to their dignity through a social code of silence ("deaf and dumb"). Malloy and his coworkers, in other words, are all nobodies, they are "bums" trying to survive on the scraps their criminal masters leave for them. It is a depressingly powerful calculation on Kazan's part -- one that works even better today, post-Godfather and post-Sopranos, than it did in the 1950s world of post-Cagney films.

Marlon Brando is rightfully praised for his performance as Malloy. Brando could have played this part as a primitive palooka, veering between tenacity and confusion throughout the picture, and probably still achieved Kazan’s goal. Instead, he boldly portrays Malloy as a former bully who wakes up after several years to discover he is just another peon among the bullied (despite his older brother's connections to the Mafia running the union). This change in circumstance has left Malloy glum and unsure of himself, all of which Brando masterfully evokes with his deliberately slow and confused speech, his gloomy – at times, almost clownish – face and his timid movements.

Malloy's troubles begin when he is used by Mob boss Johnny Friendly to lure another union employee who has been speaking to the police to his death. Malloy tries to forget the incident, but his conscience will not let him (he is also resents being used, which reminds him of his fallen status). His inability to put the murder behind him becomes even more problematic when he meets Edie, the sister of the dead man (played to perfection by Eva Saint Marie, in her debut role).

Forced by an inquisitive Edie, who finds the contradictions bubbling beneath his surface persona to be both attractive and dangerous, Malloy confesses his philosophy of life is nothing more complicated than “Do it to him before he does it to you.” Edie correctly identifies this as the law of the jungle and she tells Malloy he is “living like an animal.” Unable to deny it, Malloy tries to derail Eddie’s troubling enquiry with beer and dancing, but his Epicurean attempts are foiled by a Mafioso toughie telling him he has to meet with Johnny Friendly and policemen stuffing a subpoena into his hand. 

Like it or not, Malloy has to face his choices. He cannot pretend they will go away. He cannot play the Longshoreman way and be “deaf and dumb” the way he has in the past. Events have conspired to hand Malloy the dangerous flame of truth, and he can either speak the truth – letting it loose, damn the consequences – or bury it deep inside, where it will smolder and eventually immolate him.

Malloy's choice is further complicated by Father Barry (played powerfully by Karl Malden).

Following the death of Edie's brother, Barry has had enough of the local thuggery, and he makes it his mission to aid the helpless and expose the corruption present in the union. Barry makes a bombastic appeal to truth and righteousness after another man who comes forward is killed, arguing that those who do not speak up are as guilty of the Savior’s death as those in crowd who boisterously shouted at the Roman Govenor to free Barabbas instead of a certain Jewish preacher from Nazareth. This sort of lofty appeal is lost on most of the Longshoremen and seems contrived more for the audience than anything else. (There are persistent rumors that Kazan made this film as an apology for naming names in the infamous HUAC committee hearings on communists in Hollywood, but Kazan always denied this).

What finally stirs the union from their self-imposed slumber is the sight of Malloy fighting it out on the docks with Johnny Friendly. When Malloy beats Friendly, the unassailable thug loses his infallibility. The union's respect for him is further eroded when the Mafia boss simply calls on his minions to beat up Malloy because he cannot. This offends the men’s sense of dignity, and they subsequently transfer their respect from Friendly to Malloy, the latter of whom has proven with his body that he is a man of principle and not a rat. In these terms, it is hard to read Malloy climbing back to his feet and staggering toward his jobsite as anything other than a kind of crude resurrection.

However, Malloy's motives for standing against the status quo and speaking the truth -- in court and in his everyday life -- are not entirely moral. Not for nothing do the police investigating the union try to push Malloy's buttons by mentioning his former boxing career. They can see he is unhappy with his fallen status and hope to provoke him by reminding him what he might have been had he not gotten mixed up in the rackets. Malloy's plea that he could have been a "contender" is often cited -- and parodied -- as one of the great lines of dialogue in classic film, but the most moving moment in this expertly crafted scene, packed full of raw emotion, comes when Malloy realizes that his brother Charlie -- and specifically Charlie's close ties to the Mob -- are what has derailed his life and made him a "bum."

Charlie's betrayal and ruthless manipulation of his brother is further brought home by the fact Charlie actually considers killing Malloy in order to keep Friendly happy. "It was you Charlie," Malloy sighs, realizing how his much blame his brother shoulders, how alone he is in the world and how powerful the corruption he faces truly is (for Friendly has nearly succeeded in turning brother against brother). Later, Malloy will want revenge for what Friendly does to Charlie, but at that moment, his grief and his resignation to how ugly the world can be is palpable, and as an audience, we truly feel for him.


This is why when Malloy says “I ain’t a bum” in the early-going of the film, the line comes across as the petulant and defensive cry of a child who wants something to be true, even though he knows it is not. At first, an equally defensive and inexperienced Malloy does not know what to do with the truth, but once he warms to the notion of using it for good (both personal and impersonal good), he becomes more human and loses his haunted and unsure look. Yes, he takes a beating, and much of what he cherishes is destroyed (his brother, his pigeons), but when he gets back on his feet, he is -- for the first time since he started taking dives in the ring -- something other than a bum, and it is the truth that delivers him to this new existence.

The Complicated Bounty of Mythmaking

We never seem to tire of stories about the 18^th century ship known as the Bounty.

Sent in 1789 to Tahiti to transplant the breadfruit tree to the Caribbean, the crew mutinied against Captain William Bligh three weeks into the return journey and set him and 18 others adrift in 23-foot boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The Bounty and most of its crew then landed at Pitcairn Island and lived out their natural lives there. Bligh made an incredible 41-day journey to Timor and then returned to England. He went on to fight with Nelson, survived another mutiny in Australia and died with pomp and circumstance as an admiral.

A man driven by professionalism and duty, Bligh would probably recoil if someone suggested during his lifetime that hundreds of years later his name would be synonymous with sadism and tyranny, and if the actual history of the Bounty’s mutiny is anything to go by, he would be within his rights to feel unjustly treated by the cabal of poets, authors and screenwriters who have chosen to elevate the plight of the ship’s mutineers at his expense. But dramatically speaking, Bligh never had a chance: Artists tend not to extol the virtues of authority and argue for its legitimacy.

Caroline Alexander wrote an excellent book dispelling many of the erroneous Bounty myths that have come down to us, including the fiction that Bligh was a heartless dictator, but the splash her lively and detailed scholarship made is nowhere near powerful enough to undo hundreds of years of ripe retellings and exaggerations. Sea stories are typically better when they are not true, but on this occasion, as anyone who has read her books knows, straying from the facts has coarsened the tale and made it less remarkable. Bligh’s open boat voyage is typically given short shrift, as is the incredible tale of the British ship that returned to Tahiti to round up some of the mutineers. What we are left with, then, is a rather exotic tale of good and evil, of one man’s tyranny (Bligh) and another man’s political descent into open rebellion (Fletcher Christian, Bligh’s 2^nd in command). There is, at this point, a healthy body of literature repeating this dichotomy and at least five films that do the same.

Among this impressive corpus is the curiously uneven 1962 film starring Trevor Howard as Bligh and Marlon Brando as Christian.

The role seems a natural one for Brando, who at this point in his career is still young and dangerous-looking and full of the kind of combustible energy that worked so well when directors pitted him against some sort of authority – oppressive or otherwise. The only problem here is that Brando is horribly miscast in the Christian role and he fails to deliver most of his lines with anything like the craftsmanship we expect from an actor of his caliber. A great deal of the problem lies in the accent he inexplicably verbalizes. There is a well-known joke in England that the upper classes speak as though they have plums in their mouths. Somebody must have told Brando this, because he spends most of the picture with his head cocked slightly backward, his eyebrows aloft with a kind of bemused arch as he conjures words through his nose.

To make matters worse, both Brando and the script presents Christian as a rich dandy, bored with pretty much everything life has to offer. When he first reports for duty, he is dressed in a preposterous costume and he struts across the deck with two well-heeled strumpets on his arm. At one critical point in the film, he appears in foppish pajamas smoking a pipe befitting a hobbit. At another, he is seen traipsing around the deck sketching while the rest of the men go about the business of sailing a ship halfway round the world.

Pressed by Bligh about his motivation, Christian confesses he serves His Majesty’s navy only because the army was “too dusty” and “one must do something.” Bligh, who is presented as clearly not of this kind of landed gentry, eventually accuses Christian of thinking he is better than everyone else and being incapable of any emotion but contempt, both of which ring true and hardly make Christian the likeable leader of truth and right the film desperately wants us to think he is.

Although it is woefully inaccurate, Howard’s portrayal of Bligh is far more interesting.

In the film, the real Bligh’s foul mouth and puritanical leanings are jettisoned in favor of showing him as the living incarnation of corrupted authority. Command is lonely and personally unsatisfying and the ability to terrorize other men its only reward. Christian accuses Bligh of beating the men because he enjoys it, but as an audience, I am not sure we see any overt sadism. Rather, Bligh beats his men from a misguided sense of duty. “Cruelty with purpose is not cruelty,” he tells Christian, “it’s efficiency.”

This chilling thought, which must run through the warped mind of every dictator who ever plagued his people, is further emboldened by the mistaken notion that the best way to entice men to achievement is through fear and intimidation. The irony, of course, is that Bligh finds the concept of fear so powerful because he himself is driven by it. The scene of Bligh surrounded by breadfruit trees in his cabin, mentally quaking at the thought of any one of them not living to see Jamaica, reveals that the Captain actually fears the Lords of the Admiralty, and that his mistaken notion of leadership is akin to passing this fear down the chain of command to the common hands (blame also works this way in this film, as Bligh never seems prepared to accept that he is ultimately responsible for his ship’s failures).

The catalyst that undoes the unhappy ship’s “efficiencies” is the island of Tahiti, which in every Bounty story is presented as a verdant paradise, full of beautiful and pliant women, plentiful food and, of course, a respite from scrubbing the deck with holystones or going aloft to trim sail. It is difficult for contemporary audiences to imagine what it must have been like to work day after day on a sailing vessel in cramped living conditions with bad food and harsh discipline. It is even harder to imagine what arrival at Tahiti must have been like, for today’s expensive island vacation destination was to the 18^th century Englishmen probably akin to landing on the Moon, so different was Pacific tribal nation from everything he had ever known.

The exotic allure of Tahiti’s unusualness is captured quite well in Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall’s 1932 novel, but ignored almost entirely in this film. In its place, the complex dichotomy between conscription and freedom is explored more freely, as the sailors, led by a rebellious Richard Harris, begin to think unconsciously – and in crude terms – about their human rights.

There is something paradoxical and naive in the way all Bounty stories depict Tahiti as existing in a state of nature where the cruelty, violence and struggle for food and shelter conveniently do not exist. The trope of the noble savage is nothing new, of course, but I do not think it has ever been used more powerfully than in the Bounty stories, where the Europeans quite literally are entranced by an island culture at the same time they are abusing it and ruefully shaking their heads at its sheer backwardness.

Or maybe I am reading too much into all this? Remarking on how most of the Bounty men – save Bligh, of course – took wives and fathered children on Tahiti, a friend once quipped that the true theme of the Bounty stories is that men will do crazy things for love, which is really just a polite way of stating that men will do crazy things for sex.

Given this undeniable truth, what are we to make of the actual mutiny, then?

In the film, Christian claims he acted for honor. Later, he tries to compel the ship’s company to give up their notion of hiding on an uncharted Pacific island and return to England for the same reason. Given that honor is largely a personal matter, Christian’s role as emancipator seems complicated by these justifications and entreaties. Before he was put over the side, Bligh says “a little show of temper” is really what drove Christian to rebel – a point the novel also alludes to when it contends that Christian simply grew tired of being humiliated in front of the hands by his overbearing Captain.

Establishing Christian’s motivation is all important, because by the end of the film we are supposed to view him as some kind of hero. His protracted death scene, which finally sees Brando fulfill his talent’s promise (even if his speech runs on too long), offers an appeal to principles that attempts to redeem the mutiny on moral grounds. However, it is clear the crewmen do not view the mutiny as such, and indeed seem scornful of Christian and reluctant to endorse his worldview.

Our understanding is further complicated by the fact that the real Fletcher Christian was murdered by other mutineers, a victim of the forces of chaos he unleashed. I am not sure what lesson that leaves us with, but it is something quite different than the film, in which Christian is strangely aloof for a good two hours and then excessively lionized for a few moments before he dies. The uncertainty of anarchy and the inability of the actual mutineers to leave their former prejudices behind when they attempt to setup their own island paradise is precisely why it fails, but this problematic ending is typically untouched in most Bounty re-tellings.

Strictly speaking, Mutiny on the Bounty remains an impressive film. Its monstrous budget, which included a life-size replica of the Bounty and scenes filmed in Tahiti, ensured it is visually one of the most exciting sea-faring epics ever produced. Still, for all its fine craftsmanship, this film fails to capture the power of the actual Bounty story. It is muddled in setup, fumbled in execution and uncertain of its ultimate message, and powerful performances from Howard and Harris cannot mask Brando’s off-key and bewildering turn as Fletcher Christian.

Despite this, people should watch this film for its ambition. They should watch it for what it wants to be, not for what it is.