VALUES: Down on the waterfront, long ago...

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2026

...Brando admired "the girl:" Her name at birth was actually Saint. The leading authority offers this overview of the life of a widely admired person:

Eva Marie Saint

Eva Marie Saint (July 4, 1924 – October 6, 2026) was an American actress...

...She made her film debut in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954), opposite Marlon Brando. The film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

[...]

Eva Marie Saint was born on July 4, 1924, in Newark, New Jersey, to John Merle Saint and Eva Marie (née Rice) Saint. Her parents were Quakers. She attended Bethlehem Central High School in Delmar, New York, graduating in 1942. Saint studied acting at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

And so on, at length, from there. In the obituary in yesterday's print editions, the New York Times includes this:

Eva Marie Saint, Oscar Winner for ‘On the Waterfront,’ Is Dead at 102

Eva Marie Saint, who won an Academy Award in 1955 for her gripping movie debut as the shy love interest of Marlon Brando’s longshoreman in “On the Waterfront,” and who proved equally convincing as a stylish siren opposite Cary Grant in the romantic Hitchcock thriller “North by Northwest,” died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 102.

[...]

Her supporting performance in “On the Waterfront,” which boasted one of the most impressive casts and crews ever assembled, would alone have assured her a place in movie history; the movie remains near the top of the American Film Institute’s list of the country’s greatest films. It won the Oscar for best picture and director (for Elia Kazan), and Mr. Brando took home the award for best actor, for his tormented performance as a former prizefighter who moonlights as muscle for a corrupt union.

Even if Mr. Brando had the most indelible lines (“I coulda been a contender”), Budd Schulberg, who won the screenwriting Oscar, said Ms. Saint had the riskiest assignment—portraying a convent-educated young woman, Edie, who simmers with passion for Mr. Brando’s Terry Malloy. Edie, who discovers Terry played a role in the death of her brother, who had run afoul of union racketeers, plays a critical role waking Malloy’s conscience.

We could do without the stock about "simmering with passion." But as we noted quite recently, the Edie character does indeed "play a critical role waking Malloy’s conscience." 

As we noted on Wednesday, we've always admired Robert Redford for what he chose to portray in The Horse Whisperer—for his portrait of a grown man who is wise enough, and human enough, to care about the suffering of "the girl."   

As we recently noted, we've also long admired the thematic undercard of On the Waterfront, in which the female character, portrayed by Saint in her film debut, "plays a critical role waking [the male character's] conscience."   

The film ends in the classic male-centric way, with a fistfight down on the waterfront. But along the way, the Brando character sees that Edie is a better person than he is, and God bless his decency all the way down:

He decides that he wants to be like her!

He decides he wants to be more like "the girl!" He's helped along by Karl Malden's Father Barrie, who memorably offers this:   

Jesus Christ is down here on the waterfront...

So the Malden character says, in this famous scene.   

The Redford character cares about and respects the girl. The Brando character wants to learn how to be more like her.  You rarely see expression of such gender dynamics—of such gender values—in major American films.  

This week, it's been hard to avoid comparing those male characters to the gruesome performance of the men and women running such campuses as Cornell. To the gruesome misogyny displayed each night on the Fox News Channel. To the uniform silence meeting such cable news shows within elite Blue America.  

We expect to talk about this more in the future. Over here, in Blue America, the uniform silence will persist. 

No one will say the first word about the ugly values sold to boys and young men on those grisly Fox News Channel shows. The CEO who invented those shows will instead be sent to the Hall of Fame!

The Brando character admired the superior qualities of "the girl!" In last Sunday's New York Times, Jennifer Weiner described that very person:  

My kind, smart, big-hearted daughter...   

Her kind, smart, big-hearted daughter, who is now (gulp) a freshman in college, from whose values our struggling culture could gain.

VALUES: Did he say the same thing all over again?

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2026

There's no known cure for this: Yesterday, the sitting president said it again--or did he?   

To see what he said, you can just click here. We'd transcribe it like this:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (10/7/26): If you want to see trauma, you want to see problems—

And I said it the other day: Let them hit a missile into San Diego or Los Angeles on the way. Let them hit—

You want to see a horror show? You want to see problems?

Let them hit San Diego, let them hit Los Angeles if you want to see some bad things happen, you want to see a country that would be in free fall.

 We’re not going to let that happen. We protect our cities. We protect our country. We’re not letting that happen.

AUDIENCE: [Applause]   

"We aren't going to let that happen?"

In the view of one close reader, that's largely what the sitting president was clumsily saying the other day, with a clumsy reference to the idea that "we'll have to pay a bit more for gas" clumsily marbled in.

On this morning's Morning Joe, Mika and the others were pretending that he was still inviting an attack on the coast. (Joe wasn't there today.) Eventually, it was clear that Mark Leibovich didn't agree with what the rest of the gang was saying, but under the rules of the cable news game, he knew that he couldn't just say so.

There is no cure for the tribal mind. That's another way of saying that there is no cure for human. In our view, Al Gore didn't say he invented the Internet, and the current president didn't invite Iran to bomb the west coast

More on this another day. There's plainly no cure for this.

WEDNESDAY: What the heck did the president say?

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2026

The bombing of San Diego: Most Americans will remember the time when we were honored, admittedly by one only person, as “the best close reader in the media today.”   

The statement was attributed to Dan Kennedy, as quoted by Steve Twomey in a somewhat peculiar profile of this very site in the February 2005 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. If memory serves, we may have been the Review's cover boy in that issue, though that could be wrong. 

At any rate, the lofty accolade leaped off the page.  The passage in question went like this:

The Howler’s Quiet Moment  

[...]

“I appreciate what he does,” wrote “Jim” during a discussion of blogging on The Washington Monthly’s Web site in September, “but seriously, if I read him for more than a few days in a row, I want to scream, ‘We. got. it. the first 8,000 times you wrote it, our press is deeply dysfunctional. Move on. PLEASE.’”

But Dan Kennedy, the media critic of The Boston Phoenix, says Somerby is “the best close reader in the media today,” the most adept at parsing a story for faulty logic, sloppy research, omissions, writing tricks, and the degree to which its author swallowed somebody’s spin. Kennedy, a late-comer to the Howler, says that when he finally read it regularly, “the scales were lifted from my eyes: ‘Good Lord, this guy is amazing.’”    

Today, that's Professor Kennedy, of Northeastern University, who we've often described as the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being ever seen in print. 

In that slightly peculiar part of his profile, Twomey, a very nice guy, was displaying a slightly odd form of critical balance—pulling a complaint from a guy named "Jim" in comments, balancing it with words of praise from a professional press observer. 

By the way:

Why did we repeat ourselves so much, largely concerning press coverage of the 2000 campaign? We said the things we constantly said because we couldn't get anyone else to say them, even though everyone knew they were true, a point we repeatedly explained at the time. 

What happened in the press corps during Campaign 2000 was staying in the press corps! As everyone in the press corps knew, that was hard guild law at the time.

At any rate, there we were, described as "the best close reader." Today, close readers of all stripes face a new interpretive challenge:

What did the sitting president say about the possible bombing of San Diego and Los Angeles? We thought the performance on MS NOW last night was stunningly bad—was anthrpologically sobering.

For us, it started at 3 p.m. Eastern, ran on through the night. Maybe tomorrow, maybe later, we'll say how we think it went.

VALUES: "They could see into the creature's soul...

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2026

...and soothe the wounds they found there:" The gruesome news from Cornell has had us thinking about one of our favorite movies.    

Rather, it's had us thinking about one part of that high profile film. The film in question is The Horse Whisperer. Here's the start of the overview from the leading authority: 

The Horse Whisperer 

The Horse Whisperer is a 1998 American neo-western drama film directed by and starring Robert Redford, based on the 1995 novel The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans. Redford plays the title role, a talented trainer with a remarkable gift for understanding horses, who is hired to help an injured teenager (played by Scarlett Johansson) and her horse back to health following a tragic accident.   

The film was produced by Touchstone Pictures and released on May 15, 1998 by Buena Vista Pictures Distribution. It received generally positive reviews from critics and grossed nearly $187 million worldwide.  

Johansson was 13 when the firm was made. Continuing directly from above, here's the start of the plot:

Plot

In Lake Luzerne, New York, teenagers Grace MacLean and her best friend Judith go out early one winter's morning to ride their horses, Pilgrim and Gulliver. As they ride up an icy slope, Gulliver slips and hits Pilgrim. Both horses fall, dragging the girls onto a road, where they are hit by a tractor-trailer. Judith and Gulliver are killed, while Grace and Pilgrim are severely injured.

Grace, left with a partially amputated right leg, is bitter and withdrawn after the accident. Meanwhile, Pilgrim is traumatized and uncontrollable to the extent that it is suggested he be put down. Grace's mother Annie, a strong-minded, workaholic magazine editor, refuses to allow it, sensing that Grace's recovery is linked with Pilgrim's.

Desperate for a way to heal Grace and Pilgrim, Annie tracks down a "horse whisperer," Tom Booker, in the remote Montana mountains...

And so on from there.

That's how the authority sees it. We refer to the part of the film where the Redford character saves the emotional life of the girl, rather than the part of the film in which he falls in love with her mother. 

Focusing on that part of the film, we're not sure we've ever seen a film which was more deeply humane. We've thought of the Redford character's concern for the girl as we've followed the disgraceful news from the Ivy League this past week.  

Intriguing point: In its broad outlines, The Horse Whisperer is a virtual remake of Redford's first film as a director, Ordinary People (1980). 

In that earlier film, a tortured teenager (Timothy Hutton) is struggling with the death of his older brother in a terrible boating accident. In The Horse Whisperer, Grace—she seems to be as young as 13—is struggling with the death of her best friend, and with terrible injuries to herself and to her horse

In the more literal earlier film, the Hutton character is saved by the intercession of a caring psychiatrist. In The Horse Whisperer, the tortured teenage girl is fortunate enough to encounter the Redford character "in the remote Montana mountains," which turns out to be a very good place to be.

Early on, we see Grace's mother searching for someone who might be able to save the traumatized horse. She stumbles upon this bit of text describing an ancient separation between two branches of creation:

A million years before man, they grazed the vast and empty plains, living by voices only they could hear. They first came to know man as the hunted knows the hunter, for long before he used horses for his labors, he killed them for meat.

The alliance with man would forever be fragile, for the fear he'd struck into their hearts was too deep to be dislodged. 

Since that Neolithic moment when a horse was first haltered, there were those among men who understood this. They could see into the creature's soul and soothe the wounds they found there. For secrets uttered softly into troubled ears, these men were known as "the whisperers."

Early in the film, the girl's mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) comes upon that text in a book, along with a profile of Booker. To see that evocative moment from the film, you can click right here.  

The whisperers were able to see into a troubled creature's soul. When the mother and girl arrive in Montana, hoping that the Redford character would be able to cure the traumatized horse, the Redford character was able to see that it was really the suffering child who was most in need of help. 

He's so humane that he sets out to provide that help, even though she was the girl. 

Traumatized by her friend's death and by the injuries to herself and to her horse, the tormented child in this second film (Grace) is disappearing inside herself. Eventually, she confesses to the Redford character (Booker) that she feels responsible for her friend's death in the fatal accident, in which her horse reared up against an incoming truck.

Afte her confession, the Redford character tells her a story about a local Montana kid who was paralyzed in a terrible swimming accident, then seemed to disappear inside himself. 

"I know where he goes," the girl says. Along the way, the Redford character is decent enough and humane enough to tell her this:  

BOOKER: I won't tell you it'll stop feeling this bad. But I will tell you, you didn't do anything wrong. The same thing would have happened to me—or to Frank, or to Joey. And it doesn't make any sense to try to figure out why these things happen. 

[...] 

BOOKER: It's like the boy I knew just went away somewhere.

GRACE: I know where he goes.

BOOKER: I know you do. Don't you disappear. You do whatever you have to do to hold on.

I'll tell you one more thing. When Pilgrim reared up to face that truck, you know what I think? I think that damn horse loved you so much, he was trying to protect you. That's what I think.   

In our view, you have to go a good long way to find a more humane presentation than that.

We admired Redford for making Ordinary People—for caring about the suffering of a suffering teenage boy, despite the fact that he was a giant big Hollywood star. We triply admired him for making a version of the same film, in which a deeply humane character—a whisperer, in this case to humans—was even willing and able to look into the soul of "the girl."  

We've thought of that deeply humane character as we've followed the inexcusable news from Cornell. Also, we've thought about the terrible people running those elite universities, and we've thought about the squalor of the garbage can that gets rolled out every night on the Fox News Channel.   

From there, it's on to the broadcasting Hall of Fame! Our rumination continues tomorrow.

Tomorrow: It's hard to find the words