I recently wrote about the theme of priests fighting crime in films of the thirties and forties. It also featured in some fifties films. The ‘Method’ actor Montgomery Clift was impressive in I Confess in 1951, playing a priest who goes to his death rather than break the seal of the confessional. A murderer confesses his crime to him in the confession box in this classic Hitchcock tale. Afterwards, he himself bizarrely becomes convicted of it, leading to his execution.
One of the most controversial celluloid priests of the fifties was Karl Malden. He starred opposite Marlon Brando as a morally conflicted longshoreman in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront. Brando is affiliated with the mobsters getting ‘kickbacks’ on the Hoboken docks, but doesn’t know the full extent of the corruption.
When the brother of his girlfriend is killed, Malden, as Fr Barry, sees an opportunity to galvanise the slowly-awakening conscience of the impressionable Brando. He takes religion onto the streets to upend the stranglehold gangland henchmen have on the local workforce.
Malden based his performance on Fr John Corridan, a special advisor on the film. He spent a week with the priest at his church near Hell’s Kitchen on the Hudson River.
“He was a real man of the people,” he said after the film wrapped, “I knew I couldn’t portray this man as a sanctimonious, holier-than-thou type.”
Fr Barry said to Malden during the shoot, “Don’t play me like a priest. Play me like a man. I was born in this neighbourhood. When I was growing up, there were two ways to go – become a priest or a hood. I could easily have gone the other road.”
Budd Schulberg, who wrote the screenplay, said in Fr Corridan’s obituary in 1984, “He was the closest I ever came to feeling what true Christianity was all about.”
When he first met him, he described him as “a tall, gangling, energetic, ruddy-faced Irishman whose speech was a fascinating blend of Hell’s Kitchen jargon and baseball slang. He had the facts and figures of a master of economics and the humanity of Christ.”
Malden captured his character right from the moment he gives his first waterfront ‘sermon’ aboard a ship after a stevedore is murdered. “Everyone who keeps silent,” he urges, “is just as guilty as the Roman soldiers who pierced the flesh of our Lord.”
He appeals to the vacillating Brando, the film’s unlikely Christ-figure, in a denouement that came to be called “a crucifixion without nails.” Fr Corridan himself stated, “Some people think the crucifixion only took place on Calvary. This is untrue. Christ goes to union meetings.”
Though the film’s plot extolled the merits of whistle-blowing, the manner in which Malden persuaded Brando to do so wasn’t without an ironic undertone, for Kazan had ‘named names’ during the Joseph McCarthy witch-hunt for “Reds under the beds” in the 1950s. Some saw it as an attempt to rationalise ‘squealing,’ which compromised its impact for them.
