Waterfront: A Journey around Manhattan in 18 Films
February 27–March 11, 2004
“Every street in New York ends in a river”—so
goes the opening line of William Wyler’s Dead End
(1937), one of eighteen films presented in celebration of Phillip
Lopate’s captivating new book, Waterfront: A Journey around
Manhattan (Crown, 2004). A lifelong New Yorker, Lopate describes
Waterfront as “a mixture of history, guidebook, architectural
critique, reportage, personal memoir, literary criticism, nature
writing, [and] reverie.” For much of the past, a flâneur
could enjoy the great urban spectacle of New York’s waterfront,
teeming with stevedores and street urchins, Sunday strollers and
fishmongers, dock rats and shipworms, cruisers and sailors on leave,
and women of the night. The recent rise of luxury apartment towers
and sports complexes has made the waterfront less of a working port
or devil’s playground than it once was, but these films capture
a New York thrumming with noirish intrigue and romantic fantasy—the
New York we still cherish in our collective imagination. Lopate
will introduce the 8:30 p.m. screening of Samuel Fuller’s
Pickup on South Street (1953) on February 27, followed
by a book signing.
Organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator,
Department of Film and Media.
. 2001.
USA. Directed by Peter Hutton. A meditation on the Hudson River—its
slow, sure rhythms, brooding fog and sea smoke, and counterpoints
of wilderness and industry, transience and endurance. 35 min.
.
1928. USA. Directed by Josef von Sternberg. Screenplay by Jules
Furthman. With George Bancroft, Betty Compson, Olga Baclanova. A
waterfront melodrama about a ship’s stoker who rescues a prostitute
from drowning and then stages a fake marriage ceremony with her
for the sake of a good time. Documentary-like shots of the New York
harbor give way to an erotically charged night-and-fog atmosphere
of fishnet-strewn docks and seedy dens created in the studio. 60
min.
.
1953. USA. Written and directed by Samuel Fuller. With Richard Widmark,
Thelma Ritter, Jean Peters. Petty thief Widmark discovers a mysterious
roll of microfilm in a stolen handbag, and considers selling it
to Communist agents; fence and stoolie Ritter considers selling
him out. Fuller set key scenes of Pickup on a South Street
pier, a stone’s throw away from the apartment where Julius
and Ethel Rosenberg lived before their execution in 1951 as spies
for the Soviet Union. 80 min.
.
1946. USA. Directed by Rudy Burckhardt. “Crates and boxes
unloading in the morning, lonely men sitting on half-broken docks
in the afternoon, sailor bars at night with one poor bum actually
getting the heave-ho, a mighty waterhose washing it all away, overlooked
by the skyline” (Burckhardt). 8 min.
. 1937. USA. Directed by William
Wyler. Screenplay by Lillian Hellman. With Humphrey Bogart, Sylvia
Sidney, Joel McCrea. Wyler and Hellman mix sentiment with social
realism in transposing Sidney Kingsley’s Broadway play to
the silver screen, keeping its famed set intact—a ritzy apartment
house towering over slums at the East River’s edge. Bogart
plays Baby Face Martin, a gangster visiting his poor ma in the tenements
one last time, and the Dead End Kids make their first foray into
screen delinquency. 93 min.
.
1921. USA. Directed by Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler. One of cinema’s
first city symphonies, an impressionistic rendering of Walt Whitman’s
paean to New York by two leading photographers of the time. 9 min.
. 1927. USA. Written
and directed by Allan Dwan. With George O’Brien, Virginia
Valli, J. Farrell MacDonald. Recently restored by MoMA’s Film
and Media Archive from an original release print, this brisk, beautifully
visualized melodrama is a glorious document of late 1920s New York.
A boy from the slums longs for the finer things in life, and almost
sacrifices his beloved to get them. With wonderful location work
on the streets of Manhattan and the waterfront. 91 min.
.
2003. USA. Mark Street. Gorgeously hand-painted and emulsion-scratched
scenes of New York’s last remaining waterfront market, shot
in the urgent, early hours of the morning. 15 min.
. 1957. USA. Directed
by Martin Ritt. Screenplay by Robert Alan Aurthur. With John Cassavetes,
Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee. Director Ritt escaped the blacklist with
this provocative feature debut, a race-conscious melodrama set on
the New York docks, about a fearless stevedore who risks his life
to protect a jumpy, suspicious army deserter from the brutality
of a bigoted union racketeer. 85 min.
.
1915. USA. Directed by Raoul Walsh. Screenplay by Walsh, Carl Harbaugh.
With John McCann, Anna Q. Nilsson. An orphan-turned-gang-leader
tries to go straight after falling for a young woman who runs the
local mission. New York–born director Walsh shot on location
in squalid Lower East Side tenements and along the city’s
derelict waterfront for what is considered the first feature-length
gangster melodrama in the history of cinema, a favorite of Martin
Scorsese’s. 71 min.
.
1954. USA. Directed by Elia Kazan. Screenplay by Budd Schulberg.
With Marlon Brando, Lee J. Cobb, Eva Marie Saint. At the height
of the “Red Scare,” as names were being named in HUAC
testimonies and Crime Commission hearings were investigating waterfront
racketeering, Kazan and Schulberg galvanized the public with this
electrifying melodrama about a dockworker who informs on the mobsters
running his longshoremen’s union. 108 min.
.
1930. Germany. Directed by Jacques Feyder. With Greta Garbo, Hans
Junkerman, Salka Viertel. Shorn of the artifice that marred her
star turn in Clarence Brown’s Hollywood adaptation of the
Eugene O’Neill play, Garbo breathed world-weary despair into
the eponymous Swedish heroine in this revelatory German-language
version. In German, English subtitles. 82 min.
. 1903. USA. Produced
by Thomas A. Edison, Inc. Cameraman Edwin S. Porter captured the
remarkable array of boats lining the New York Harbor at the turn
of the twentieth century, from Mallory Line ocean steamers and canal
barges to barkentines and commuter ferries. 3 min.
. 1962. France/Italy/USA.
Directed by Sidney Lumet. Screenplay by Norman Rosten. With Raf
Vallone, Maureen Stapleton, Carol Lawrence. Stark black-and-white
images of the Red Hook waterfront shot by master French cinematographer
Michel Kelber set the tone for Lumet’s intense, naturalistic
adaptation of Arthur Miller’s play about an Italian-American
longshoreman who lusts guiltily for his wife’s orphaned niece.
110 min.
. c. 1930. USA. A Fox newsreel shot
in the early wide-screen “Grandeur” process, depicting
the construction of the George Washington Bridge. Le Corbusier would
later write, “Made of cables and steel beams, it gleams in
the sky like a reversed arch…. It is the only seat of grace
in this disordered city.” 3 min.
. 1973. USA. Directed by Joan
Jonas. With Jonas, Gordon Matta-Clark, and others. Inspired by Japanese
Noh, Jonas choreographed and filmed this haunting, ritualistic performance
piece on the banks of the Hudson River in wintertime. 19 min.
. 1961. USA. Directed
by Gordon Hitchens, Ken Resnick. Gospel and soul music fill the
air as the Harlem Social Club takes a leisurely barge trip up the
Hudson River in this poignant nonfiction short. 26 min.
Program 48 min.
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