Arts & Culture
This has been a brutal summer for fans of On the Waterfront. First came the news of co-star Karl Malden’s death on July 1. Then yesterday, August 5, word came down that the movie’s screenwriter, Budd Schulberg, had left this mortal plane to join Malden at the great commissary in the sky.
But then it’s always been difficult for Waterfront fans. What other classic film – outside the collected works of Leni Reifenstahl – is so tainted by historical context and suspect creative intent that it forces viewers into the awkward position of denouncing its message and its messengers even while praising its form? When Waterfront was released in 1954 its goals were so shameless – an apologia for Schulberg, director Elia Kazan, and co-star Lee J. Cobb, all of whom had named names at the notorious HUAC hearings – as to be almost laughable. But in the end, the artistry behind all that self-justification was enough to make even the most stubborn moralists bow their heads in respect – to the work if not to the men behind it. Say what you will; On the Waterfront makes a compelling (and sublimely acted) case for squealing.
Poor Schulberg. Here you’ve got one of the great American novelists of the 20th century and one of the best screenwriters from anywhere ever, and you simply cannot pay tribute to the man on the occasion of his death without mentioning the fact that he is one of history’s great stool-pigeons. His name, like Kazan’s, has become synonymous with disloyalty.
It all started with his struggles with the Communist Party (which he had joined in 1936) and the Party’s struggles with him. Back then being in the Communist Party meant something; members were expected to perform duties for the cause. So when Schulberg went to Party leaders in 1941 to ask permission to skip his assignments so he could have more time to work on the novel that would become the great What Makes Sammy Run, those leaders told him he would only be granted such an exception if the novel clearly extolled the virtues of their ideology. An artist first and a zealot second, Schulberg balked at the idea, and the Party balked at his refusal. They found him disloyal to the movement; he found them disloyal to the artistic ambitions of one of their own.
So the Communist Party, which he loved, kicked him out because they didn’t like the book he was writing (too ideologically impure); the Hollywood elite he had been born into didn’t like the book he wrote (too slanderous); and the book itself featured all manner of characters stepping all over their so-called friends (not to mention their union brothers and sisters) to get what they wanted, loyalty be damned entirely. Schulberg’s bitterness was starting to show. Then came the HUAC hearings, at which the writer got his revenge on his formers brothers on the left by giving them up one by one. He ratted out former friends, many of whom, including Ring Lardner, Herbert Bibberman, and Lester Cole, would be found guilty of contempt as members of the Hollywood Ten, sent to prison, and blacklisted from the movie business. Then he wrote Waterfront, which, for all its grace and intelligence, is really little more than a justification for a rat. Schulberg’s script may make the bad guys worse (Hollywood Communists becoming ruthless shipyard gangsters) and the good guys better (Hollywood screenwriters and directors looking to save their own skin become a beaten-down but decent boxer looking for a little justice for his murdered friends), but the transparency of those shifts just serves to accentuate how desperate he and Kazan were to win the PR game and shift calumny off of their ratting and onto those they ratted on. Loyalty to friends and country and even art got lost in the rush to maintain careers, reputations, and righteous defiance.
Maybe, in the end, Shulberg’s greatest sin was simple myopia, that he couldn’t see past the narrow scope of his time to realize that, like all things, the Communist scares of the early-Fifties would eventually pass away and all (alleged) sins of ideology would be forgiven. Unfortunately, what can never be forgiven is disloyalty in the face of difficulty, and from the day Schulberg testified until the day he died, unapologetic and unrepentent, he was never free from the disdain of his peers in the movie business. From 1941 until his death, disloyalty was the watchword of Budd Schulberg’s life, the cause of all his troubles but also the source of all his creativity. As a writer he was able to spin the issue that haunted him into gold, and the world loved him for it. As a man, however, loyalty was the ideal against which he would always be measured, and today, less than 24 hours after his death, even while it mourns his passing, the world still finds Budd Schulberg wanting.
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