Two Films Literally On the Waterfront–That Aren’t ‘On the Waterfront’
The new Pier 6, with its rope swings, water park and geodesic climbing structures, sits at the harbor end of Atlantic Avenue. Last weekend, it opened as a playground, along with a new water taxi route to Governor’s Island. Anyone who has recently visited Pier 6 should watch the opening sequence of Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, a mostly true film about the New York waterfront mobs made in 1957, to see how far the city has come.
Slaughter on Tenth Avenue opens by panning across the wooden predecessors to the concrete piers that are now being transformed into Brooklyn Bridge Park. Then the camera finds a fedoraed gunman waiting next to the Dock Company building that’s now the luxury condo One Bridge Park. A sedan swings around the corner from the pier, and he’s off to his appointment, riding over the bridge accompanied by newspaper-reading henchmen and an ominous brass score.
The movie tells the story of the real murder of Andy Hintz (renamed Solly Pitts), a West Side dock foreman who fatally refused to share hiring privileges with the racketeers. The actual Hintz was shot by Johnny "Cockeye" Dunn on January 8th 1947. The opening scenes of Slaughter on Tenth Avenue tell the murder story pretty faithfully, except for the crime’s address, changed to Tenth Avenue to go with the music that gives the movie its title. "Who shot you?" Solly’s wife asks, finding her husband shot on the stairs. “’Cockeye,’” Solly answers, “’Cockeye Cook and two of his meatballs.”
This movie, which screens outdoors at Freebird Books at dusk tonight (Thursday, June 10th), is adapted from the superb memoir The Man Who Rocked the Boat, by William J. Keating, the Assistant D.A. who successfully prosecuted the real Hintz case and sent all three of the real-life assailants to Sing Sing’s Death Row–a landmark achievement in those days in which prosecutions were as rare as willing witnesses in dock murder cases. As Keating describes the waterfront at the time he arrived on the scene as a young lawyer from a Pennsylvania mining family:
Waterfront murders were the most hopeless of cases. Longshoremen were always getting shot, or beaten over the head with baseball bats, or flung into the harbor. There seldom was any real mystery about the killings. The murderers were usually well known but arrests and convictions were unheard of, because waterfront workers and their families had little confidence in cops and talked to them only off the record, if at all. A man could be killed in broad daylight before half a dozen witnesses and nobody would testify about it. On the waterfront, to talk was to rat, and to rat was to stand exposed and unprotected.
Slaughter on Tenth Avenue is a product of the same newspaper and government investigations that drove On the Waterfront three years earlier, but it stars Richard Egan as the blandly incorruptible young prosecutor instead of Marlon Brando as the corrupted ex-boxer and sometime longshoreman suddenly afflicted with a conscience (“That word again!” Terry complains at one point). Slaughter is a good courtroom drama with excursions to the West Side docks, where Keating digs up potential witnesses and even joins a brawl between dockers and strikebreakers. Walter Matthau does his best to seem menacing as a rackets guy in the union, and if one of the film's sharp-faced goons makes you want to laugh it might be because he later played Jerry Seinfeld’s Uncle Leo.
Next Thursday, June 17th, Freebird is screening Edge of the City, which came out the same year as Slaughter (1957), but is another kind of movie entirely: the cargo hooks and freight cars, though real, help to disguise this hipster film wrapped inside a docks drama. In between the scenes on the piers are smoky nights at small-combo jazz parties. Edge of the City opens with a beautiful nighttime shot of the harbor, as Army deserter John Cassavetes leaps to make the late ferry to Jersey. There he is befriended by the admirable and charismatic Sidney Poitier, who gives Cassavetes much needed advice in his developing feud with their corrupt boss Jack Warner, leading to an inevitable duel with their hooks. (It’s worth seeing along with another of Poitier’s films, The Defiant Ones (1958), with Tony Curtis, itself a civil rights movie wrapped inside a prison break story.)
Both films start at sunset, if weather permits, in Freebird’s backyard; otherwise at 8:00pm.
