Ravinia 2019, Issue 5, Week 10

8:00 PM FRIDAY, AUGUST 9, 2019 PAVILION CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA DAVID NEWMAN, conductor ON THE WATERFRONT COLUMBIA PICTURES Presents An ELIA KAZAN Production MARLON BRANDO ON THE WATERFRONT co starring KARL MALDEN • LEE J. COBB with ROD STEIGER • PAT HENNING and introducing EVA MARIE SAINT 0usic Ey LEONARD BERNSTEIN Screenplay Ey BUDD SCHULBERG Produced Ey SAM SPEIGEL Directed Ey ELIA KAZAN On the Waterfront © , renewed Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. All rights reserved. Ravinia expresses its appreciation for the generous support of Program Sponsor Lori Ann Komisar and Morris Silverman . ON THE WATERFRONT Program note by Jon Burlingame By any measure, On the Waterfront is among the all-time great motion pictures. It won eight Academy Awards®, including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Original Screen- play. It is number eight on the American Film Institute’s top- list. And it contains the only original lm score composed by Leonard Bern- stein, who ranks among the best-known gures in the history of American classical music. Novelist Budd Schulberg ( What Makes Sam- my Run? ) had been researching and writing about corruption in the New York longshore- men’s unions in the early s. Director Elia Kazan, who had enjoyed success both in the theater ( Death of a Salesman , A Streetcar Named Desire ) and in socially conscious lms ( Gentle- man’s Agreement , Pinky ), found in Schulberg’s script a story he wanted to tell: “Shame and guilt are replaced by self-reliance and dignity,” as he wrote in his notes during the production. In the lm, Terry Malloy (Marlon Bran- do)—a former boxer and now part-time enforc- er for Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), the power- ful mob boss who controls the longshoremen’s union local—meets Father Barry, a waterfront priest (Karl Malden), and Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint), the grieving sister of a dock worker who has been murdered for daring to testify against the corrupt union o cials. Terry eventually de- cides to testify too, pitting him against not only Friendly but his own brother Charley Malloy (Rod Steiger), Friendly’s lieutenant. On the Waterfront producer Sam Spiegel wanted a marketable name on the movie poster to help him promote this independently pro- duced lm about a potentially incendiary topic. So he approached Leonard Bernstein, who was already famous as the conductor of the New York Philharmonic and composer of Broadway’s On the Town (and who would soon add Candide and TV’s Omnibus to his credits as an innovative composer and charismatic lecturer on music). But he had never before scored a lm. Ber- nstein later said that he felt “a surge of excite- ment” a er seeing an early cut and that he was “swept by my enthusiasm into accepting.” He began composing in New York in February and ew to Los Angeles for the April re- cording sessions at Columbia Pictures, where studio music director Morris Stolo conducted the approximately -minute score. Bernstein opens the lm with a solo French horn. is was rare in the Hollywood of the s; nearly every movie started with a full orchestra playing a kind of overture. Here, the composer employed one lonely horn, eventual- ly joined by a ute, then a trumpet, then a few more instruments. Bernstein called it “a quiet representation of the element of tragic nobility that underlies the surface of the main character.” e main title segues into a second major theme and a powerful way to begin the story. It’s Bernstein’s motif for the violence on and around the New Jersey docks, in two parts: the wild 7onight’s presentation of On the Waterfront will include an introduction Ey author, narrator, and filmmaker -amie %ernstein, whose memoir Famous Father Girl details her youth spent in an atmosphere of music, theater, and literature cultivated Ey her father, Leonard %ernstein. A8G8ST 5 ɰ A8G8ST 11, 201 _ RA9,1,A MAGA=,1E 101