Tea at Trianon: On the Waterfront (1954)

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, September 29, 2023

On the Waterfront (1954)

From Tony Esolen at Word and Song:

The priest leans over the body of a dead man, who has been crushed to death on the docks — a murder made to look, barely, like an accident. For Kayo Dugan was about to testify against the corrupt union boss, Johnny Friendly, and his henchmen, and their protection racket. “Some people think the Crucifixion only took place on Calvary,” says Father Barry (Karl Malden), who himself can throw a mean punch when the need demands it. “They better wise up! Taking Joey Doyle's life to stop him from testifying is a crucifixion. And dropping a sling on Kayo Dugan because he was ready to spill his guts tomorrow, that's a crucifixion. And every time the Mob puts the pressure on a good man, tries to stop him from doing his duty as a citizen, it's a crucifixion. And anybody who sits around and lets it happen, keeps silent about something he knows that happened, shares the guilt of it just as much as the Roman soldier who pierced the flesh of our Lord to see if he was dead.”

It’s hard for people these days to say anything about our Film of the Week, Elia Kazan’s magnificent On the Waterfront, without appealing to the social and political circumstances surrounding it. Not that they’re wrong to make the appeal. Kazan was a formidable social critic. He took on prejudice against Jews in Gentlemen’s Agreement. He took on racism and its cruelties in Pinky. He was himself the son of Greek parents who had fled from persecution in the Ottoman Empire. He hated communism, and for a very long time he was hated in turn by people who held it against him, that he had testified before the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Yet his films are dramas of good and evil as they go to battle in the human soul, and the price we must pay, in our own persons, lest evil should triumph. (Read more.)