Edge of the City on the Edge of Integration
From "Leap Year at the Movies": How Martin Ritt Debut Helped Introduce Brazen Sidney Poitier
How do some motion pictures both entertain and enlighten?
How might they elicit both personal memories and select historical events?
What if you spent an entire year where you viewed one film a day?
. . . Here’s another excerpt from
Leap Year at the Movies: 366 All-Time Greatest Films (of the Past 104 Years). . . .
By William R. Boyer
#309 (FEBRUARY 28)
Edge of the City (Martin Ritt, 1957)
Trailblazer Sidney Poitier introducing mainstream audiences to anti-racist prototype.
Hollywood’s slow shuffle into occasional liberal messaging features many starts and stops during the last century, beginning with cultural reactions to D.W. Griffith’s troublingly influential 1915 uber propaganda, Birth of Nation, which innovates exciting film story editing. . . and absurdly, exalts the tragic rise of the Ku Klux Klan.
While the perpetual clash of art and politics would include a few muckraking movies and even bold projects never made (such as proposed historical scripts with Black opera and theater star Paul Robeson), the long overdue cinematic war on bigotry does not roar into view until Bahamian American legend Sidney Poitier crash-lands in the early 1950s. His comet first arrives as a Jackie Robinson-like gate crasher, three years after Brooklyn Dodger #42 finally crosses the color-line in Major League Baseball.
The best argument for a more startling early commentary on race relations, a year before The Defiant Ones, is Martin Ritt’s Edge of the City (1957).
Chronologically, it’s easy to cite Poitier’s ill-at-ease dedicated doctor thrown into a mobster underworld in No Way Out (1950) as the popular anti-bigotry breakthrough. Because the hyperbolic white villain (who conveniently tries to prevent an autopsy) offers a safe distance for the average Caucasian audience, other critics might naturally point to the heavy-handed Defiant Ones (1958), with the Poitier-chained-to-Tony Curtis southern fugitives on the (three-legged) run. It’s the kind of reoccurring Academy Award-bait which invoked the (formerly) all-white Oscar voters to give the film nine nominations to feel better about themselves (if not African Americans).
The best argument for a more startling early commentary on race relations, a year before The Defiant Ones, is Martin Ritt’s Edge of the City (1957). Both director Ritt and Poitier were coming off a four-year Red Scare blacklist, for working in the New York theater scene with some leftist and (gasp) communist friends. Their real-life backstory would be pertinent to a film about non-compliance, in an existentialist answer to Elia Kazan's much more lauded — and more conservative — On The Waterfront (1954).
While Waterfront benefits immensely from an electrifying Marlon Brando, who inadvertently disguises Kazan's offensive theme of trying to justify naming names (Kazan eagerly complied before the House Un-American Activities Committee), Edge of the City boasts another young method-actor John Cassavetes (an eventual highly influential independent film director) and the uniquely upstart Poitier daring to confront issues Waterfront failed to acknowledge, namely, workers' rights and workplace racism.
Edge of the City boldly dives into this (then) unknown territory, with Poitier believably playing the intelligent, confident, empathetic — and still vulnerable Tommy Tyler, the new comrade to Cassavetes’s quietly apprehensive drifter-with-a-secret, Axel North (interestingly, an army deserter). Tommy soon forms an affable working buffer with his new friend against Charlie Malick, Jack Warden’s formidable bully foreman, who’s soon trying to extort extra work and money from his latest hire.
Although the union dock power struggle may seem a bit simplistic, the courageous battle against seething prejudice, with its inevitable violence, has hardly aged at all. One wonders how shocked initial 1957 moviegoers were at such a bold presentation of Black-white relations (if some didn't leave the theater early, they must of left a bit stunned).
The last film reel will still surprise audiences, for it refuses to sink into expected clichés, including those tainting Waterfront, such as an unconvincingly supportive priest trying to convince Brando to go to the police. While both films feature a climatic fight in front of embittered workers, director Ritt avoids the tidy simplicity of Kazan's rationalized ending. Only the most jaded viewers will not realize how Edge remains such an entertaining, radical film.
Both Ritt and Poitier would enjoy remarkable careers portraying troublesome dramas around education, labor, class and of course, race. This lost classic oddly stayed unavailable on any format, for reasons that remain quite murky until it surfaced in a Sidney Poitier compilation in late 2008 (another reason to not trust the growing monopoly access of “The Cloud”).
Although it took some initial convincing, the landmark Edge of the City became a rare educational connection with my two teenagers during our 2020 Lockdown homeschooling (note: youth tend to reflexively reject black-and-white movies, regardless of the content). This should be required viewing in American high school history or college film classes, however uncomfortably it may land with some. . . .
Axel and Tommy warily eye their boss bully.
Coda: On the 28th of February, 1953, Francis Crick loudly interrupted lunch patrons and their noontime ale consumption at the famed Eagle Pub in Cambridge, proclaiming he and James Watson had "discovered the secret of life," now widely known as DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid), the double helix biopolymer carrying the genetic code of the reproduction, development and function of essentially all living organisms.
Too bad their ultimate scientific discovery identifying fascinatingly minor variations within species could not finally terminate the artificial social construct of race — and all forms of rationalized bigotry. . . .
You would think we'd be farther ahead in our understanding and acceptance of each other. I'll have to check this movie out!