Marlon's Mao: Part Three

On The Waterfront!

Hmmm …

As Hamlet says, mortality “must give us pause”.

Therefore, “Hmmmm ….. ”

On what must be my tenth viewing of that American masterpiece, I realized how tragically prophetic it has proven to be.

What inspired Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg to collaborate in recording what is still The Great American Tragedy?

On The Waterfront is clearly a heroic drama, not a tragedy, with a thrillingly courageous victory for its hero in the end.

What makes it a possible tragedy now?

The testimony Kazan gave to the House Un-American Activities Committee, naming members of the American Communist Party with which he had participated in meetings, not only branded him as a “stool pigeon”, stigmatized him like Brando’s Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront, but, in addition, has grown over the years to carry a tragic foresight within it.

Many distinguished theater critics hold to the elitist’s definition of tragedy, that the word cannot be applied to any figure that has not attained the highest levels of cultivation, those most often symbolized by titles such as King or Emperor … or President of the United States.

In that context, On The Waterfront does not qualify.

However, the basics of the plot for On The Waterfront have now been shifted to the White House.

Our President, as has been said about other would-be Presidents such as Dan Quayle, “is no John F. Kennedy!” Nor even Marlon Brando for that matter, despite our President’s admiration for Don Corleone of The Godfather.

Today, Johnny Friendly is in the White House, he has a Harvard education and can meet regularly with the exact breed of Union leaders whom you find in that disgusting little hut on New York’s waterfront.

The polished manners of the Ivy League do not conceal the bullying obsessions of Chicago mob rule any more than the Dartmouth degree softened the New York Italian ruthlessness of Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone.

This, the Great American Tragedy of Communism’s homicidal insistence upon invading America as a “Progressive Movement” – the assassination of the very Catholic President John F. Kenney being one of its most disgracefully high points – will, I have massive faith, eventually turn out to be just another triumph of America over the mortal enemies of her infinitely and universally resonant Declaration of Independence.

Here, while basking in the relevance of On The Waterfront, I suddenly see the cosa nostra metaphor, the Brechtian fascination with Chicago mobs, the Obama administration’s Red-packed Czardom and Mao Zedong himself as the Godfather of all Godfathers … this mounting tower of Progressive Babel, making absolutely no sense whatsoever unless you have a ruthless mob willing to enforce it.

Our Second Amendment?!

If we don’t have weapons in our hands, the enlightened despots still know that we’re packing heat.

Most important is our American knowledge of the truth and the power of love.

With our government now run by no more than an Ivy-league educated, gangster’s mob, I recall Terry Malloy’s reluctant acceptance of a pistol from his doomed lawyer brother who insists – following one of screen history’s greatest moments of acting, Rod Steiger’s resigned and tragic sigh, the beginning of his surrender to the inevitability of his own death – “You’re gonna need it!”

Here is where, even before Karl Malden’s firey priest makes his re-entrance, God begins to arrive.

Then, of course, the hair-raising race down the darkened alley when Terry Malloy and Edie Doyle first barely escape being run down by Johnny Friendly’s hit team truck, then see the hanging, dead body of Rod Steiger.

Brando’s childlike plea to Eva Marie Saint to take care of his brother’s now fallen body, that gun in his possession, ready to do business.

Terry goes to Friendly’s bar to reek revenge upon his brother’s killers. With his hand still bleeding from the near-death escape with Edie, Terry hunches on the bar, gun in hand, to await the arrival of Johnny Friendly.

Who shows up?

A priest … a Catholic priest.

God again!!

This is where I will interject my own personal interpretation of Marlon Brando’s seemingly conflicted, two lives: the one as romantic, super-star, acting genius … and then the gradual but metaphysically sudden explosion into a kind of fatter than fat Buddha.

There’s no God in Buddha, only Enlightenment.

Something larger than ourselves is glimpsed by all religions and I have no doubt that Mr. Brando, after sifting through the full implications of On The Waterfront and the size of Kazan’s gift to American freedom by testifying before the HUAC, reached for Buddha to save himself from Karl Marx.

Apropos of the survival instinct Brando found necessary for his soul, George Will at the CPAC conference gave, what I consider, the undeniably best speech of a highly competitive list of speakers. In it he inspired the audience, after regaling them with the absolute insanity of the Progressive hara-kiri being sold America by the Obama administration, and reminded us that America has faced at least as bad a suicidal ideology as Obamanomics, if not worse. Try a Civil War and two World conflagrations out of which America rose as the human race’s hero of nations.

Or, as Brando himself has remarked, “if it doesn’t kill you, it will make you stronger.”

I, of course, attribute that to Divine Intervention.

Yes, God.

Apparently Elia Kazan, even though he had hobnobbed with the atheistic likes of the Group Theater, clearly found God to give him not only the courage to testify against Communism but to create in gratitude one of the greatest American films, On The Waterfront.

The only thing I share with Marlon Brando, aside from friendships with both Stella Adler and Harold Clurman, is an alcoholic mother.

As that great actor has indicated more than once, a mother like that can keep you always on your toes.

It is with such alertness that I can show you how Marlon Brando’s entire career and Elia Kazan’s On The Waterfront can lead you up a Marxist gangster’s totem pole to the Godfather of all Godfathers, Mao Zedong.

That Godfather is even colder, more cunning and more ruthless than Al Pacino’s title role in The Devil’s Advocate. Yes, Mao Zedong is the Godfather of all Satanists.