[lbo-talk] Owners of the world unite

[Arthur Maisel]

Brando turned down the part initially because it was obvious to him that
Kazan wanted to justify naming names. This bothered him enough to reject
the offer from someone he felt strongly indebted to and would otherwise
have wished to work with. He then let himself be talked into it by his
agent, but was unhappy with his performance (for which he won an
Oscar)---or maybe with his participation in the project?---for the rest of
his life.

The uniion in the movie was understood by many people at the time (and ever
since) to be a stand-in for the Communist Party, because both Kazan and
scriptwriter Budd Schulberg had been cooperative witnesses before HUAC. In
the prehistory of the movie was a script by Arthur Miller that did deal
with waterfront corruption (not as a stand-in). Harry Cohn agreed to
produce it but wanted it to be made more "pro-American" (given an
anti-Communist angle). Miller refused to rewrite it after Kazan's
testimony, which had happened in the meantime and which led to a
thirty-year rift between Miller and Kazan..

On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 1:05 AM, JOANNA A. <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:


> I have no idea.
>
> Joanna
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>
> > On Oct 6, 2015, at 7:51 PM, JOANNA A. <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> >
> > But the only thing anybody remembers about that movie was the "I could
> have been a contender" scene between Brando and Rod Steiger. And the union
> stuff drops away.
>
> Was that true when it came out?
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