"On the Waterfront" Brings to Mind "Mrs. Dalloway"

I was recently re-watching, after several decades, the film "On the Waterfront" and at one point it brought to mind Virginia Woolf's novel "Mrs. Dalloway."

"On the Waterfront," directed by Elia Kazan, staring Marlon Brando and introducing Eva Marie Saint, was released in 1954. Considered a classic, it's about union violence and corruption on the New York waterfront.




At one point, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) is getting to know Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint) in a café after a problematic start to their relationship because Malloy was an unwitting accessory to the murder of Doyle's brother Ben by the bosses of the union to which Malloy belongs. The union chiefs wanted Ben gone before he could testify against them at a Waterfront Crime Commission.

Edie asks Terry about his background and Terry explains that after his father "got bumped off," he and his brother Charley were put "in a dump they called a children's home" from which he ran away and eventually became a boxer.

Suddenly Terry stops his story.

Terry: "What do you really care? Am I right?"

Edie: "Shouldn't everybody care about everybody else?"

Terry: "Well, what a fruitcake you are."

Edie: "Well, isn't everybody a part of everybody else?"

Terry: "And you really believe that drool?"

Edie: "I do."

Edie expresses there a very humanistic spirituality: that we are all connected to each other and, at a seminal moment in "Mrs. Dalloway," published in 1925, readers learn that Clarissa holds a very similar view.

Recalling that both her old friend Peter Walsh and her husband Richard had laughed at her because of her parties, Clarissa contemplates the big question: “… what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh it was very queer. Here was so-and-so in South Kensington; someone up in Bayswater, someone else, say in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt that if only they could be brought together; so she did it.”

She views her parties as “an offering” – to life, or one might say, or to the betterment of society. They are not, as one might first presume, primarily an attempt to further her husband’s career. Richard, who has gotten as far as he is going to get in British parliamentary politics, understands that and it doesn’t bother him. Instead, he worries putting on a party might be bad for Clarissa’s health (even though it is clear the servants have done the vast amount of the work).

People need to be brought together because they are in essence "one," Clarissa believes just as Edie believes she should care about Terry because everybody is a part of everybody else.