CONDUCT UNBECOMING

THE CURRENT CINEMA

- ANTHONY LANE

Among other things, “On the Waterfront” (1954) is a glove story. Walking near the river, on a cold day, Eva Marie Saint drops a glove. Marlon Brando picks it up and puts it on. He unwraps a stick of gum. After a while, she tugs the glove from his hand. Contact is made. She goes and stands by an iron railing. He says, “You don’t remember me, do you?” Just before she replies, we hear music: woodwind solos, with the clarinet leading the way. “I remembered you the first moment I saw you,” she says. Strings join the woodwinds. Brando chews gum, walks off, turns, and beckons, calling out, “Come on.”

The music, unobtrusive yet edged with romantic encouragement, is by Leonard Bernstein. It’s the only score that he wrote directly for the movies. If only he had written more. (“On the Town” and “West Side Story” sprang from the theatre and, for many listeners, lost a jolt of energy when they arrived onscreen.) In truth, given his influence on so many realms of American culture—as a composer, a conductor, a lecturer, a TV presenter, an author, a New Yorker, and an activist—it’s astonishing how faint a mark Bernstein left on cinema. Maybe he feared, with good cause, that the compromises involved in filmmaking were even more grievous than those inflicted elsewhere. His most astute contribution may be “What a Movie!,” a mezzo-soprano number composed for his 1952 opera, “Trouble in Tahiti,” during which the heroine, Dinah, derides a film that she just saw (“What escapist Technicolor twaddle”), only to be swept up, despite herself, in the tropical fantasies that it purveyed.