Review: "Val"

 

Celebrity can be a blessing, a curse and a drug -- often all, and for the same person.

Consider the lifespan of movie stardom. Maybe one out of 10,000 young film actors breaks out of the pack, and even then their heyday usually lasts a few years at most. You can be one of the most famous people in the world, and just a few beats of a lifetime later you're largely forgotten.

"Val," the new biographical documentary about (and largely by) Val Kilmer is a testament to the fleeting, fickle nature of celebrity. It's essentially one actor's cinematic diary, shot by himself using handheld video cameras dating back to his childhood when they first became available to the general public, and he and his brothers made all sorts of movies.

He looks back on his life and movies with the sort of clear-eyed honesty you don't get from a Hollywood celebrity, even a washed-up one.

Read the rest on Substack!

 

Reeling Backward: "The Wild One" (1953)

Yes, Brando again. There's quite a bit of bullshit associated with the now-iconic movie "The Wild One." Almost everything about it is fake or contrived. Yet it remains one of Brando's most remembered roles, and its style more or less defined the look of the 1950s youth movement.

First of all, the movie was a huge flop when it came out. Brando had already had his breakout role in "A Streetcar Named Desire," and had just appeared as Mark Antony in "Julius Caesar" prior to this film. Yet people often regard "The Wild One" as an influential commercial hit. Laslo Benedek directed from a script by John Paxton.

Second, it was based on an event that happened in real life in 1947 that was greatly exaggerated by Life Magazine. Some bikers came to Hollister, Calif., for a motorcycle rally. There was some rowdiness, a great deal of drinking, some arrests and a few injuries as serious as a broken bone. But it was nothing like the sordid tales of a mob of biker thugs "taking over" a small, peaceful town.

Journalists trumped up a good story, and Hollywood decided to trump that one.

It's also interesting that the hooligans in "The Wild One" are constantly referred to as very young punks. Brando's character, Johnny Stabler, is almost always described by the older townsfolks as a "boy," even though the actor was nearly 30 years old at the time. The joking, smirking members of Johnny's gang, the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club, sneeringly refer to their elders as "Dad" or "Pops." Even if the actors portraying them were much older -- there's one guy glimpsed in the mix who must be middle-aged -- I think the BRMCers are supposed to be teenagers.

This sets up a question of who exactly the bikers are supposed to represent. The real Hollister "rioters" were grown men, indeed probably many of them veterans returning from the war who were looking for a chance to cut loose after their nightmarish experiences. Teenagers in 1953, though, would put the BRMC firmly amidst the "Silent Generation" born during the Great Depression to World War II. Even the threat of being drafted into the Korean War was winding down by the time the movie came out.

It's the difference between those who earned our freedom with a debt of blood and the kids who grew up benefiting from the bravery of their forebears.

There's also the notion that "The Wild One" is a celebration of youthful rebellion. When you really drill down into the story, though -- a straightforward, terse affair at a mere 79 minutes -- you find that the filmmakers are essentially shaking their heads at the wayward nihilism of Johnny and his loyal followers. It's closer to "Reefer Madness" than "Bonnie and Clyde." It's more cautionary tale than free-for-all.

Most everyone knows the most famous line of dialogue from the film: When Johnny is asked what he's rebelling against, he responds "Whaddya got?". But it's not delivered during a defiant staredown against an authority figure in the streets, but a shugged moment of casual flippancy while flirting with some town girls in a bar.

Personally, I think the most telling lines come at the beginning and end of the movie, delivered by older men dismissing Johnny and the BRMC with world-weary contempt. In one of the last scenes, after a small army of deputies have arrived to quell the uprising, the sheriff squints at Johnny and alleges -- accurately -- that he doesn't get his shtick, and what's more, he doesn't think Johnny really understands it himself.

Helpfully, another exchange supplies most of the answers. When the BRMC fails to break up the local motorcycle races -- their criminality only gets as far as stealing a second-place trophy -- a pair of men shake their heads after successfully driving off Johnny & Co.:

Mechanic: "I don't think they even know where they're going. Termites! Nutty! Ten guys like that gives people the idea everybody drives a motorcycle is crazy. What are they trying to prove anyway?"
Cop: "Beats me. Looking for somebody to push them around so they can get sore and show how tough they are. They usually find it someplace, sooner or later."

Note the language in that second line: the bikers aren't looking to push people around, but to annoy others until they themselves get pushed around, just so they can push back twice as hard. They instigate and then go crazy when provoked. That's why Johnny and the BRMC are best described as rebels without a cause, since they're reacting to the order around them with slouch-shouldered chaos.

Speaking of rebels and causes, it's undeniable that "The Wild One" influenced other film icons. Elvis Presley and James Dean copied their long sideburn haircuts from Brando, and Dean reputedly bought a Triumph motorcycle because of the one Johnny drives in the movie (which was actually Brando's own personal motorcycle, according to legend). The look of tight jeans, boots and black leather zippered jacket also became instantly ensconced in pop culture.

Brando is his usual charismatic self, chewing his dialogue and glaring balefully at authority figures. Johnny despises cops because, he says, he once trusted one and it came back to bite him. He takes a shine to local good girl Kathie (Mary Murphy), but dumps her cold upon learning her father is the ineffectual town sheriff (Robert Keith).

Lee Marvin makes one of his notable early career appearances as Chino, the boisterous leader of a rival motorcycle gang called the Beetles. They show up in the same town as the BRMC, and Chino and Johnny promptly have a throw-down over Johnny's stolen racing trophy. Moments later, Chino is laughing and ready to buy him a beer. We learn that two gangs used to be one until Johnny's group splintered.

That trophy is emblematic of the entire film. It means nothing to Johnny -- just a hunk of gold-plated tin one of his boys absconded with -- until someone else tries to lay a claim on it, and then he's ready to spill blood over the trinket. He offers it to Kathie moments after meeting her, and she refuses, thinking he won it legitimately.

The movie ends with Johnny, defeated and humiliated, giving the trophy to her right before riding out of town for good. Of course, he can't just hand it to her nicely, but sets it on the counter of the coffee shop where she works, and pokes it toward her with a finger. It's a result of his burning desire to be different, to disparage and denigrate the societal norms others place value upon.

"The Wild One" is the story of untamed youth with nowhere to go and nothing to fight for, except the fighting itself.

Reeling Backward: "The Men" (1950)

According to legend, when they first cast a young unknown stage actor in his first film, "The Men," the producers and cast thought they'd made a staggering mistake. During pre-production rehearsals, he mumbled his lines without barely any intonation, and wouldn't even look others in the eye.

His work in front of a camera didn't seem much better at first. In the movie he's constantly tucking his chin, turning away from the person he's speaking to and darting his eyeballs this way and that. Hardly the standard M.O. for cinematic acting of that era, with its ethos of "Stick out your jaw, and puff up your chest."

Of course, Marlon Brando wasn't your everyday actor playing a standard leading man. Ken "Bud" Wilcheck is an Army lieutenant who was shot in the spine during the war and left a paraplegic. "The Men," written by the great Carl Foreman ("High Noon"), was one of the first mainstream movies to address soldiers dealing with paralysis.

At a crisp 86 minutes, the film is a fairly straightforward drama that makes all the obvious choices, but nonetheless manages to wander into daring territory. Start with the fact that it was shot at the Birmingham Army Hospital in Van Nuys, where both Foreman and Brando spent time living with the soldier-patients prior to shooting. Eventually, dozens of them would appear in the film.

It's pretty obvious watching the movie, directed by Fred Zinnemann in one of his earliest feature film efforts, to discern who the professional actors are and who are the real soldiers. The best of the amateurs is Arthur Jurado as Angel, a body-building paraplegic with dreams (cut short, naturally) of buying a house.

His name was Angel, because if you were a Latino character in a Hollywood movie between 1940 and 1970, it was contractually required that your name be Angel.

Jack Webb is solid as Norm, the acerbic intellectual of the bunch, and Richard Erdman has fun as Leo, the wise-cracking flimflam man. But it's no surprise that Brando steals the show, showing the mix of volatility and seductive power that would become his hallmarks. He even manages to spend a great deal of the film topless or wearing one of those tight-cropped T-shirts he would make so famous two years later in "A Streetcar Named Desire."

It's funny; Brando's career was often marked by its physicality, split into two phases: lithe and corpulent. He never really seemed to have an in-between, though I guess the days of "The Godfather" and "Last Tango in Paris" hit that mark the closest.

I won't bother with a treatise on The Method versus other schools of acting -- frankly, I just don't care how a performer finds their center or sense memory or all that jazz. I judge an actor by what's up on the screen, and I think anyone watching "The Men" in 1950 knew a major new talent was on hand, even though the film flopped financially.

The dialogue isn't the greatest; Foreman was still developing as a writer. After Angel dies -- because all characters named Angel in Golden Age movies die -- Bud stews to his fiance, Ellen (Teresa Wright): "If he was normal, he'd have had a chance. You try and you try, but you're still behind the eight-ball."

That ain't exactly the Bard, but Brando still makes it sing.

Perhaps as a prisoner of its age, the story is forced to revolve around a romance. Bud at first refuses to see Ellen following his injury, but is convinced by the stern-but-caring doctor (Everett Sloane) to come around. They eventually reconcile and marry, but then the movie takes an unfortunate step where the open-hearted young woman who was more than ready to embrace life with a man in a wheelchair suddenly has second thoughts, literally on her wedding night. 

It's a false moment, and sets off one narrative stumble after another during the last 20 minutes or so.

The real heart of "The Men" is given location by its title: the camaraderie, strained and often backbiting, between this hospital ward full of brave men all suffering from the same physical and psychological wounds. If only Foreman, Zinnemann and producer Stanley Kramer had stuck to their instincts, given the boot to the dew-eyed girl, we might've really had something. 

Instead, "The Men" is justly remembered as what it is: a cinematic stepping stone.

 

Reeling Backward: "Morituri" (1965)

"Morituri" wasn't very commercially or critically successful. If it wasn't done in by its title -- Latin for "those who are about to die" -- then the clunky plotting in the film's second half did the trick. It starts out as an interesting and cerebral WWII espionage thriller, with Marlon Brando playing a charming scoundrel, and devolves into a confusing tale of mutiny and sexual intrigue aboard a German cargo ship carrying 7,000 tons of rubber.

Why rubber? According to the haughty British colonel played by Trevor Howard -- aren't all cinematic English military men puffed-up prigs? -- that much rubber will keep German army vehicles rolling across Europe for several more months. Without it, their control over Europe slips, so the fate of the entire war rests upon the decks of the aged ship Ingo.

(Have you ever noticed that in most war flicks, "the fate of the entire war" often rests on the people and events depicted in the movie?)

The Allies don't just want to sink the ship as it makes its way from Tokyo to occupied France, but capture it for themselves. To this end they recruit Robert Crain (Brando), a wealthy German military deserter living in luxury in Australia. He's blackmailed into posing as a Gestapo officer ("standard leader") and placed aboard the ship as a passenger. His mission is to disable the explosive charges used to scuttle the ship, so when the Ingo enters into an Allied trap in the middle of the Pacific, the precious cargo won't be lost.

The best and most interesting sequence of the movie is when Crain, now redubbed as Mr. Kyle, first boards the ship and must navigate the various personalities and power intrigues going on. Brando is a treat, playing a sly man of refined manners who must pretend there is a great, evil resolve underneath. Of course, he really is highly motivated, but not to the end anyone thinks.

The captain, Mueller, is played by Yul Brynner, who isn't too keen about having an SS man spying on his operations. Mueller's last cruise ended with his ship getting torpedoed while he was inebriated (medical treatment for an infected jaw, according to the official report). The Ingo represents his last chance to get back in the Third Reich's good graces -- something he desires mostly for the benefit of his family, especially his son, the commander of a destroyer operating in the Atlantic.

Mueller and "Kyle" clash immediately, with the captain restricting the Gestapo man's movements around the ship -- sure to put a crimp in his sabotaging style. So he enlists the aid of the first mate, Kruse (Martin Benrath), a fervid ideologist who believes he should've been given command of the ship anyway.

Things get shakier the further we go. Turns out there are plenty of political prisoners and criminals amongst the crew, who are being shipped back to the Fatherland to face their fate in one of those "all the rotten apples in a single barrel" strategies that only exist in the movies, and always seem to backfire. Soon Kyle is recruiting support from them for a mutiny, including Monkeyman (Hans Christian Blech), a blond tough who has a pet bird.

And then it just gets weird. Just as Kyle has managed to alert a British destroyer to the fact that the Ingo has been disguised to look like one of their own, a German submarine blows it out of the water. The U-boat is commanded by an admiral for some reason -- fleet officers don't generally limit themselves to a single vessel -- who is immediately suspicious of the purported SS agent aboard.

Meanwhile, they drop off the survivors of a passenger ship they previously torpedoed -- which is pretty unlikely; as we know from "Das Boot," there's barely enough room on a WWII submarine for the crew, let alone prisoners -- aboard the Ingo. Among them is a Esther (Janet Margolin), a Jewess and self-described "anti-German" who is none too pleased about her fate.

Captain Mueller offers to help the girl and advises her to hide her Jewish heritage, but instead she throws it in the face of Kyle (thinking him a loyal Gestapo man), Kruse and everyone else. She also offers to sleep with Mueller, tells her loutish fellow Americans she's open to a gang rape, and relates a tale to Kyle about being forced to have sex with her brother while others watch. I have no idea what this material is doing in the movie, but it brings the proceedings to a cold stop.

Director  Bernhard Wicki and screenwriter Daniel Taradash were somewhat limited in adapting the novel by Werner Jörg Lüddecke, which contains this and many other ludicrous elements. (For starters -- why disguise Crain as a high-profile SS agent, instead of just a meathead member of the regular crew?) After the film performed poorly, the studio tried to re-title it as "The Saboteur," but it didn't help things.

When the ship gets to sinking, Wicki -- perhaps limited by his production budget? -- doesn't bother with special effects. He simply tilts his camera so it looks as if the Ingo is listing. But you can clearly see that the waterline of the ship hasn't changed. 

Aside from the chintzy camera tricks, "Morituri" is a nice-looking film -- evidenced by its Oscar nominations for black-and-white cinematography and costume design. And Brando is charismatic and compelling as a man stuck in circumstances he doesn't really want trying to do the best he can. But the cranky plot sinks this cinematic ship.

Reeling Backward: "One-Eyed Jacks" (1961)

I didn't think I'd like "One-Eyed Jacks." It was directed by Marlon Brando at the precipice of his acting career, right before he slid off into a decade-long fallow period revived only by "The Godfather" in 1972. He had never directed before, and never stepped behind the camera again. Usually, that sort of thing happens for a good reason.

All in all, it has the ingredients of an overstuffed vanity project, a la Kevin Costner's "The Postman."

Early on, the film's languid pace (2 hours and 20 minutes) and Brando's mush-mouthed delivery of lines seemed to confirm my suspicions. But soon the film won me over with its curious mix of Western mythology, revenge story and romance.

It's perhaps the actor's most distilled expression of his persona as a performer, a moody wash of resentment and pride. His gunslinger Rio is the apotheosis of Brando's young rebel roles, now grown a little older and more cautious. He's not always quite sure what he wants or what the right thing to do is, but whatever path he chooses Rio commits to with all-consuming passion.

In his late 30s, Brando was no longer the smoldering screen presence of the 1950s. His torso had started to thicken, his jawline soften, and if his hairline wasn't yet fleeing back across his head, it was at least looking for the exits.

Set in the dusty foothills of Baja California and then moving to the idyllic seaside town of Monterey, "One-Eyed Jacks" is about a friendship gone bad.

Rio and Dad Longworth (Karl Malden) are longtime roustabouts robbing banks and having a good time. Dad is considerably older, a veteran bandit who picked up Rio when he was a kid and taught him the ropes. Even though he's far surpassed him as a gunman, Rio still looks up to Dad, who's starting to lose a step.

In Brando's close-mouthed, Southern-fried vernacular, "Dad" comes out sounding like "Ndahd." The same can be said for the rest of Rio's speech, which Brando delivers like he's chewing over every syllable and reluctant to spit it out.

A heist goes bad, the lawmen have them pinned on a mountain peak with only one spent horse and a rifle between them, and Rio suggests one of them hightail it down to a little ranch they know about nearby, pick up a pair of fresh horses and save the day. They opt to leave it to chance to see who rides off with the gold while the other waits.

Rio suggests Dad pick which of his hands is holding the bullet, but rigs it by pulling a cartridge from his gun belt so Dad will be the one to ride. Why? Perhaps he figures the older, slower Dad deserves a break. Maybe Rio figures that Dad, lacking a hat or shoes from their hasty getaway, won't last in the broiling heat. Or maybe he just loves Dad and trusts him.

In any case, Dad gets a fresh horse and then flees with the gold, leaving Rio to be captured by the Federales. Before he's taken in, the posse stops by the ranch where Rio learns of Dad's betrayal.

Flash five years later. After busting out of the Sonora prison with a Mexican pal (Larry Duran), Rio begins searching for Dad to exact his revenge. Along the way he throws in with Bob Armory (Ben Johnson), a quietly malevolent sort who wants to knock over the fat bank in Monterey.

Turns out that's where Dad has gone to ground, reforming his ways and even being elected sheriff. He's also married a widow named Maria (Katy Jurado) with a teen daughter, Louisa.

She's played by Mexican actress Pina Pellicer, who had a short but memorable career kicked off by her performance in "One-Eyed Jacks." With her thin, sallow face and languid eyes, Pellicer had a dark, unconventional beauty for her era. She also managed to instill more depth and emotion in the dialogue than screenwriters Calder Willingham and Guy Trosper did. Sadly, she committed suicide three years later.

The genesis of the screenplay is a little fuzzy, with Willingham, Trosper, Stanley Kubrick and Brando himself all contributing drafts at various points. It's a very, very loose adaptation of the novel "The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones" by Charles Neider.

It's at this point that the plot goes kind of sideways, but things get really interesting. Rio, Bob and their crew ride into town, but Rio peels off for a visit at Dad's place. Dad lies to him about the circumstances of his betrayal, and introduces him to his family, with an immediate spark between Rio and Louisa.

Now, this sounds like an exceptionally lousy way to go about robbing a bank. But Rio is less concerned about getting rich than getting even -- or, at the very least, getting satisfaction for being treated so shabbily by his best friend.

After a huge carnival party, which Rio uses as a cover to seduce Louisa and deflower her as a way to get back at Dad, the gunman realizes he doesn't really know what the wants. At various points Rio means to kill Dad, or run off with Louisa, but things don't quite work out.

After Rio kills a drunk in a fair fight, Dad uses the incident as an excuse to take revenge for Louisa. He beats Rio to a pulp, flays his back to shreds with a whip, and pulverizes his gun  hand with the butt of a rifle. Rio spends a couple months at a nearby fishing village healing up, with Bob and his partner growing increasingly frustrated. They signed on for a rich bank scheme, not a Shakespearean revenge drama.

Bob finally robs the bank without Rio, shooting a girl bystander and getting killed himself in the process, but Dad uses it as an excuse to hang Rio and rid himself of his troubles. Malden's steely, internal performance suggests that Dad doesn't really hate Rio, but he despises that his presence reminds Dad of his own failings.

Rio, for his own part, is incensed that Dad has managed to turn his life around as easily as flipping over a poker card. "You're a one-eyed jack around here, Dad. I seen the other side of your face," he accuses.

Also notable is Slim Pickens as Dad's jackal of a deputy, Lon, who has designs on Louisa. Pickens usually played bumbling, cartoonish characters, but he's chilling here.

Like other novice directors, Brando made the wise choice to hire a veteran cinematographer, Charles Lang, to handle the visual look of the picture. The result, nominated for an Oscar, has a scuffed-up kind of a beauty, vivid colors mixed with off-putting close-ups.

The most interesting thing to me about "One-Eyed Jacks" is that it relies more on the power of inference than overt depictions to demonstrate the internal workings of its characters, especially Rio and Dad. Rio is such a deviation from the classic Western protagonist, in that he's a man of action who often isn't sure how to act.

Six-shooter characters, even when they aren't supposed to be heroic, are often defined by their single-minded pursuit of a goal -- think John Wayne in "The Searchers." Rio is more akin to Brando's urban characters of the '50s, torn apart by misdirected passion and existential angst.

3.5 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Julius Caesar"

At the risk of sounding foolish, I have never really cared for William Shakespeare.

When I say that, I'm talking about actual performances of his plays, as opposed to reading them. The Bard's work is really best experienced textually, where you can look at the words, repeat them to yourself, study them and -- as is often necessary -- research them to figure out just what the heck ol' Will was saying.

It's not just the half a millennium that has passed between us, with a changing set of historical reference points and the understandable migration of the English language over that time.

Shakespeare was writing for an extremely literate audience -- one that lived in a city large enough to support a playhouse, and populated by people rich enough to afford to go. So he wrote long, beautiful prose that no living person, now or then, could possibly conjure to their lips on the spur of the moment.

I guess that's the thing I've never been able to get past with Shakespeare: It just doesn't sound anything like real people talking. Even the very best orators are not off-the-cuff eloquent and cohesive in their speech -- just listen to the difference when President Obama doesn't have a teleprompter in front of him.

Or, to get the fully glory of "ums," "y'knows" and the general disorderliness of regular people talking, just tune in to any of the podcasts we do over at The Film Yap.

All this is a rather long wind-up to saying that although I appreciated the wonderful acting performances and production values of Joseph L. Mankiewicz' 1953 production of "Julius Caesar," I simply had too hard a time piercing the dense fog of beautiful but confounding dialogue to really appreciate the film.

The cast is magnificent. John Gielgud plays Cassius, the main instigator of the uprising against Julius Caesar, who had defeated all his enemies and been declared Rome's dictator for life. James Mason is Brutus, Caesar's good friend and "the noblest man of Rome," who leads the assassins because he feels Caesar has usurped too much power.

Caesar -- a relatively minor character in the play and film that bears his name -- is played by Louis Calhern. And Marlon Brando is Mark Antony, his best friend and right-hand man. Edmund O'Brien is Casca, Greer Garson is Caesar's wife Calpurnia, and Deborah Kerr is Brutus' wife Portia.

The story is well known, so I won't belabor describing the plot. The film's high point is Marc Antony's address to the Roman throng on the stairs of the Senate shortly after Caesar's murder, where he slyly indicts Brutus and his co-conspirators without ever coming right out and saying it.

But really, the most compelling figure of the film is Brutus, who is played by Mason as a man of pure heart struggling with inner conflict. Even Mark Antony honors Brutus, even as he maneuvers to oust him and capture power for himself.

The depiction of Caesar's murder is particularly bloody for a 1953 film, but since the play had scenes with his murderers dipping their hands in his blood and so forth, it would be hard to film a family-friendly version.

The costumes, sets and other production values are top-notch -- this film won the Academy Award for art direction.

Although I must say those Caesar haircuts are distracting -- you know the ones, where the hair is parted a the crown of the head and combed forward. No matter how handsome the actor, he always looks like he's wearing linguine with that style.

I also couldn't help but notice that both Mason and Gielgud wear Roman-style sandals, but with a high heel that adds a few inches to their height. Both actors were tallish, just under 6 feet, so the effect is to make them loom over most of the rest of the cast. I didn't notice any other actors wearing lift shoes, and if you glance at their feet when they're visible in a few scenes, it's rather comical.

I hope you won't think ill of me that I just can't get into Shakespeare -- at least rote recitations of his plays. I think the best way to experience his timeless works is with movies that recast his language and setting in modern idioms, like Baz Luhrmann's 1996 "Romeo + Juliet" or the 1995 version of "Richard III" starring Ian McKellan.

Or just under a good lamp, with reading glasses, if necessary.

2.5 stars

Reeling Backward: "On the Waterfront"

Everyone's personal filmography contains some holes, and "On the Waterfront" was one of the biggest in mine. I'm glad I plugged it.

Some movies fade with time, or their setting or stories become antiquated. Right before I started watching "Waterfront" I put on another Marlon Brando movie, "Teahouse of the August Moon," and didn't get 10 minutes in before I turned it off. I'm sure it's a fine film, but I was too put off by Brando portraying a Japanese man, complete with eye prosthetics and pidgin English ("Sank you velly much.")

"On the Waterfront" has an immediacy and punch that renders it timeless. Even the setting of New York dock workers intimidated by mobsters feels like it could have jumped out of a New York Post headline in 2009.

Nowadays the film is remembered for one thing: Brando's performance, captured in the famous "I coulda been a contender" speech in the back of a taxi. It is indeed a knockout, and Brando embodied an entire new way of embracing film acting. Up until him and his ilk, movie performances were essentially seen as stage acting that is recorded. So everything is big and broad. Brando's more naturalistic approach makes you believe that Terry Malloy is just another street hood who shrugged his way into our lives.

The contender dialogue is great, but the moment of the film that floored me is when Father Barry, the priest played by Karl Malden, stands at the bottom of ship's cargo hull and gives a sermon over the body of a dead worker who's just been killed by a falling load of whiskey. It was made to look like an accident, but everyone knows he was offed for daring to testify against the corrupt union bosses. Malden stands there, his speech slowly building from a benediction to a call to arms, even as mob chief Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) stands at the top and glowers. Some of his flunkies throw vegetables and even bottles at Father Barry, but he keeps on thundering away. Terry decks one of the mobsters for throwing stuff at the brave priest, and this is the real turning point for his character, the moment of truth when he decides to defy the bosses.

Johnny Friendly looks upon Terry as something of an amusing pet. A former boxer, Terry took a dive at the orders of Friendly, who had fixed the betting, and became just another palooka with a bent nose and swollen eye sockets. Friendly tosses him cush jobs like a master turning over his scraps to a dog. Terry isn't really a member of the inner circle, but his brother Charley (Rod Steiger) is Friendly's right-hand man. So they get nervous when Terry falls for Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint), the sister of a guy he unwittingly set up to take the fall for Friendly's enforcers.

You want to talk about a great cast? "On the Waterfront" had three Oscar nominations for best supporting actor -- Malden, Steiger and Cobb. Brando won for Best Actor, and Eva Marie Saint won in the supporting actress category. Not to mention Academy Awards for best picture, director, screenplay, cinematography, editing and art direction.

Director Elia Kazan had one of the truly great careers, although his heyday only lasted from the late 1940s until the early '60s. He's reviled in some circles for testifying against fellow filmmakers in the McCarthy hearings. But his influence as a filmmaker is undeniable. Just watch -- and listen -- to any of the outdoor scenes, where the churn of machinery in the background seems almost timed to the rhythms of the dialogue, like another musical score beneath Leonard Bernstein's (also nominated for an Oscar).

"On the Waterfront" deserves its reputation as one of the greatest American films, ever.

4 stars

Reeling backward: "The Godfather, Part II"

A great number of film critics and scholars regard the sequel to "The Godfather" as being superior to the original. I am not among them.

The sequel, which came out in 1974 -- a mere two years after the original -- won more Oscars than its predecessor, including Best Picture for both films. It follows the saga of mob boss Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) in 1959 while interspersing the story with flashbacks of his father Vito's arrival in America in 1901 and his rise as a crime lord in 1917-1918.

Each film clocks in at around 200 minutes, making for a pretty long sit. "Part II's" plot unfolds at a much more leisurely pace, but I never find it boring. Alas, my lovely bride did not feel the same way, dozing through long stretches of a recent viewing.

My own take on seeing the movie for probably the 8th or 9th time is that the 1959 sections really sing, while the Vito Corleone stuff is actually a bit draggy. It's amazing to me that Robert De Niro won an Oscar for this role, which I don't consider anywhere near his best performances like "Raging Bull" or "Goodfellas."

It's also interesting that De Niro, who took over the part from Marlon Brando in the first movie (Brando being much too old to play a 25-year-old Vito), makes no attempt whatsoever to take any cues from Brando's portrayal of the character. There's none of the theatrical bombasity or the carefully veiled menace of Brando. Granted, this was supposed to be Vito 30 years earlier, and few men behave in middle age as they did as a young man (and woe to those who do). But I think if you showed each movie to separate audiences who hadn't seen them and told them the two actors were playing the same character, they'd be astonished.

And as much as I think the 1959 sequences with Michael are the strongest part of the movie, they don't anywhere near match the grandiosity of the original. This has mostly to do with the antagonists -- the rival Mafia figures who oppose the Corleone family. They're just not that frightening, or even interesting, as the group from the first movie. The triad of Barzini, Tattaglia and especially Virgil "The Turk" Sollazzo made for worthy adversaries. Plus Sterling Hayden as the imperial police captain. Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) is the chief heavy in "Part II," and is so low-key that even his threats seem more like whining.

"Part II" is much more a character study than the original, which is probably why critics like it more. The exploration of the disintegration of Michael's persona has generated a lot of long articles in film periodicals that nobody reads. It's still a terrific movie, but there's a reason "The Godfather Part II" did not hold up with audiences over time. When you say "The Godfather," everyone thinks of Brando.