(It’s been a while since I wrote something here that is not a review. If you want to read smarter things about On The Waterfront, wait for Robert’s review soon. Also I have no idea if I’ll write something like this again, even though this is the kind of writing I prefer doing. I’m not interesting enough though. This is more on the Wishloff lane.)

Enough self-effacing words. On The Waterfront came out on July 28, 1954 using leftist aesthetics to spew right wing rhetoric. I watched this, oh my God, forever ago and I liked it at the time. This was at a time when I liked everything old, but also when shows like Saturday Night at the Movies (RIP) showed stuff that was canonically good. This was also the kind of movie that would be on primetime on TCM instead of dogshit time slots. The Alex North score slaps.

The politics in On The Waterfront makes me ashamed of this movie the same way that Gone With The Wind is one of my favourite films of all time but I can’t ever see that again for obvious reasons. Same reasons why we can never watch Allen and Polanski again. Also there are two Black men here who have at least a combination of one or two lines? Also, I Googled to see if I wrote about this in my old site and nothing came up.

On The Waterfront features Eva Marie Saint’s debut performance, for which she won an Oscar. I will waste time and space on this review for emphasis. There’s a certain kind of slay it takes to win an Oscar for your first film. I haven’t clocked the minutes to see if there was category fraud. But in fairness to her, I’d rather stand down instead of compete with Grace Kelly and Judy Garland. It’s also a crime that Saint didn’t go up against Mercedes McCambridge. And pardon the gay sacrilege, but I do prefer how the former can find levels within her character.

Sadness and rage are sisters and Saint can access both. She was one of maybe two or three female characters in a film of mostly men. There’s some sexualization of her, but not overtly because there are only so many ways to ogle a woman mourning her murdered brother. Although of course there’s a scene where she tells him to stay away from her but he forces himself on her and she eventually consents. And then she turns into the ‘don’t do the brave thing’ girl. But there’s also the one scene where her expression rivals Falconetti.

Had Saint won the Oscar or even never been within the Academy’s radar, Hollywood would have cast her in these neorealist roles anyway. That’s at least according the a reductive version of Hollywood history, until Alfred Hitchcock got his pervy hands on her. Now when you read Eva Marie Saint, one thinks of her glam (ish) roles, North by Northwest, The Russians Are Coming, Frasier. One can see Hitch’s influence as negative because maybe they thought she picked roles for style and not substance.

Although that’s just one of many reasons why Saint’s star waned. Age is one of them, which is detrimental in an industry that discards women when, God forbid, they turn 45. She also could never crack the reductive top 3 or top 4 of any decade, which during her time was Audrey, Elizabeth, Grace, and Marilyn. Anyway, her turning from American neorealist to glam is like when Brie Larson and Michelle Williams did it, but there are other circumstances that came with those makeovers.

Going back to Hitch though, maybe his influence wasn’t so bad. It’s like he came up to her and said “You’re a hot girl, you do hot shit” and she never looked back and I respect that. His advice also makes me think that he and Megan Thee Stallion would have been best friends.

Watch On The Waterfront on The Criterion Channel.