[lbo-talk] Owners of the world unite

Arthur Maisel arthurmaisel at gmail.com
Wed Oct 7 10:24:01 PDT 2015


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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