The Film Club Read Online Free PDF Page A

the newsroom—this was almost fifteen years before—I thought, “Too pretty. Forget it.”
    We had, nevertheless, a brief flirtation which she terminated after a few weeks with the stern observation that while I was “fun to drink with,” I was not “boyfriend material.”
    â€œAt my age,” she said, “I can’t afford to find myself down the road in two years with a dead-end relationship.”
    Several years went by. I was leaving my bank one afternoon in an underground mall when I ran into her at the foot of the escalator. Time had lengthened her face and she looked slightly haggard. An unhappy love affair, I hoped. I tried again. We had a few dates here and there, and then one evening, walking home from somewhere, I looked over at her silhouette and thought, I must marry this woman. It was as if some mechanism for self-preservation clicked on, like a furnace on a cold night. Marry this woman, it said, and you will die happily.
    On hearing the news, Maggie took me aside and whispered, “You must not blow this one.”
    Next I showed Jesse Citizen Kane (1941), “Pretty good but no way the best film ever made,” John Huston’s Night of the Iguana (1964), “Bullshit.” Then On the Waterfront (1954).
    I start with a rhetorical question. Is Marlon Brando the greatest film actor ever?
    Then I do my pitch. I explain that On the Waterfront appears to be about cleaning up corruption on the New York docks, but what it’s really about is the accelerating emergence of a new form of acting style in American movies, the Method. The results, where actors personalize a character by connecting it to real-life experience, can be over-personal and wanky, but here they’re divine.
    I go on to explain that there are a number of ways you can look at the film. (It won eight Oscars.) On a literal level, it’s an exciting story about a young man (Brando) who is faced with a real crisis of conscience. Does he allow evil to go unpunished, even though it’s been committed by his friends? Or does he speak up?
    But there’s another way to view it. The film’s director, Elia Kazan, made one of those awful life mistakes that stays with you forever: he was a voluntary witness before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee in the ’50s. During the Committee’s “investigations,” I explain, actors and writers and directors were routinely blacklisted for being members of the Communist Party; lives were ruined.
    Kazan got the nickname “Loose-lips Kazan” for his hand-licking performance and his willingness to “name names.” Critics claimed On the Waterfront was in essence an artful justification for ratting on your friends.
    I can see Jesse’s eyes clouding over so I wrap up by asking him to watch for a scene with Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint in a park; he takes her glove; puts it on; she wants to leave, but can’t as long as he has it. When Kazan talked about Brando, he always talked about that moment. “Have you seen it?” he used to ask interviewers in the voice of a man who has witnessed, first-hand, an event that should not be able to take place in the natural world—but has.
    On it went. I showed Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? (1966); Plenty (1985) with Meryl Streep. Graham Greene’s The Third Man (1949). Some of the films Jesse liked, some bored him. But it beat paying rent and having to get a job. I got a surprise when I showed him A Hard Day’s Night (1964).
    It’s hard for someone who didn’t grow up in the early ’60s, I said, to imagine how important the Beatles were. Barely out of their teens, they were treated like Roman emperors everywhere they went. They had the extraordinary quality of making you feel as if, in spite of their hysterical popularity, you alone understood how great they were, that they were somehow your own private