My analysis of Elia Kazan's 'On The Waterfront'


An analysis of 'On The Waterfront' starring Marlon Brando




On The Waterfront starring Marlon Brando is 1 of the greatest films of all time. Ex-boxer Terry Malloy could've been a contender, but after taking a dive, he winds up on the dock of a Brooklyn waterfront, a pariah for conspiring in the murder of Joey Doyle, a popular dockworker, who was going to testify against Johnny Friendly. Terry is set up in a cushy job, all he has to do is tell Johnny who the rats are. But when Terry falls in love with the sister of the man he helped kill, he is forced to make a decision that pits him against his own brother, Charlie The Gent, in one of the greatest acting scenes ever filmed!
The iconic cab scene involving Rod Steiger and Marlon Brando is enough by itself to consider this as one of the best films ever made. Winner of 8 Oscars and also starring Lee J. Cobb, Fred Gwynne (The Munsters), Karl Malden, and a very young, very sweet Eva Marie Saint in her acting debut, Waterfront is a film for the ages, a prime example of great casting and acting, and extraordinary direction from Elia Kazan who, just 1 year later, put out another iconic film, East of Eden starring the late great James Dean.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kay Corleone's abortion: Analysis of a scene from 'The Godfather' Part 2

Image
Francis Ford Coppola's 'The Godfather' Part 2 Kay's Abortion The themes of Michael’s half of this sequel are death, extinction, suicide, murder; unlike the 1st film, life does not complement death . First, Hyman Roth tried to have him killed and now, in this scene in which his wife, Kay, threatens to take their children and leave him and he finds out the truth about her miscarriage. She had an abortion, she murdered his son! Her intentions for doing so are explicit; she wants to extinguish the Corleone Family. She is upset at the hypocrisy she sees in Michael at how he wiggled his way out of being prosecuted by flying in an alibi from Sicily. It isn’t a coincidence that Mama Corleone dies in this film. She was the last family connection to the homeland. Kay represents America hypocrisy, blind to its own evils yet critical of the evils committed by others. In her world and her courts, she would have succeeded in depriving Michael of his children. However, in Michael’s ...
Read more

2001: A Space Odyssey 'Explosive Bolts' fully explained!

Image
In this scene, I'll examine a scene from '2001: A Space Odyssey' that involves Dave Bowman manually reentering the ship.  Dave Bowman is left with no choice but to leave the pod without his helmet and re-enter Discovery 1 manual emergency airlock. Man's over-reliance and technology will lead to our extinction and at some point in the future, there will have to be a reset where man reclaims his life from AI. That's what this scene represents which is why Bowman has to MANUALLY open the pod to reenter the ship.  Bowman is a fetus leaving the security of its mother's womb (which in this case is the technology inside of the pod itself) and being thrust into a new world of knowledge; the signal from the monolith discovered on the Moon has affected both HAL and Bowman.   The pod with its life-support systems is like a mother’s womb when he literally explodes violently from the pod into the new environment much like how oxygen explodes into a newborn’s lungs after bein...
Read more

Deactivating HAL 9000 From 2001: A Space Odyssey fully explained!

Image
In this scene from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dave deactivates HAL 9000 after reentering the ship, Jupiter. Dave deactivates Hal’s higher brain functions. Hal pleads with Dave not to deactivate him but Dave ignores him and does so anyway as Hal’s memories begin to fade until he reverts to his 1st programmed memory, a song called Daisy Bell, which he sings to Bowman before dying. To me, this scene is almost like a rape scene as Dave is cold, almost cruel, and Hal is vulnerable and unable to prevent Dave from robbing him of his very essence. There’s the duality of power as Dave takes back control over his life and the ship itself from technology, which man has become overly dependent on. This power dynamic, or change, started the moment Dave decided to use the “manual airlock” to get back on the ship. This means that true AI that is able to perceive its own mortality and is able to feel will see man as a threat and see itself as superior and will probably seek to destroy us to prese...
Read more