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The past is never dead. It's not even past NOT EVEN PAST Search the site ... Film Review – A View From the Bridge (Directed by Sidney Lumet, 1962) Like 6 Tweet By Yael Schacher A View from the Bridge is the story of an Italian American longshoreman named Eddie who informs on two of his wife’s relatives, illegal immigrants Marco and Rodolpho, in order to prevent Rodolpho from marrying his niece, Catherine. Critics of the lm, and of the play by Arthur Miller on which it is based, have generally paid scant attention to the representation of migration in the story and as a result have often found the characters’ motives hard to read. Miller’s original inspiration for his “Italian tragedy” was the immediate post-WWII context, when he was immersed in the labor conicts on the Brooklyn waterfront and made a trip to Italy to visit the families of Brooklyn longshoremen. Over the next 15 years, as is clear from many drafts of the story in the Ransom Center collection, Miller, Norman Rosten (who wrote the screenplay), and Lumet, shifted the emphasis to downplay the history of illegal Italian immigration. This history begins in the 1920s when the United States passed a law that drastically limited the number of immigrants who could enter the United States from Italy (and elsewhere). But because crewmembers on ships arriving in American ports were given temporary shore leave, Italians began entering as sailors or as stowaways, who then remained in the United States permanently, often with the help of regular crew members. After WWII, when unemployment in Italy increased the pressure to emigrate,.immigration authorities saw these seaman-stowaways, known as “submarines,’ as a major problem. They began to screen crews for potential deserters and conduct targeted raids in immigrant communities (frequently based on tips from informants). Italian American longshoremen facilitated illegal immigration for various reasons. Some were smugglers and contractors who got the migrants off the ships and found them jobs as stevedores in exchange for portions of their pay. On the New York waterfront these xers could function well because of the power of a longshoremen’s union to manipulate the hiring process and demand kickbacks. Around the same time Miller began working on A View From the Bridge, he wrote a screenplay also set on the Brooklyn waterfront that depicted the connection between the longshoremen’s union and illegal Italian immigration. In The Hook, a corrupt union boss attempts to maintain his power by forcing “submarines” to vote for him in a union election. Miller depicts the illegal immigrants as vulnerable, but not as passive or weak; once an Italian American longshoreman explains to them, in Italian, what is at stake—“Paisani! Is this the America you broke your backs to come to? We’re trying to live like human bein’s…We’re your brothers! We’ll protect you!…Dishonor on you if you steal my bread!…I have children! I am a family head!…You’re an honest worker, no?”—some of the submarines walk out of the union hall rather than vote against reform. Early versions of the play that became A View from the Bridge, imply that Eddie himself may have originally come into the country as a submarine; he sees in Marco a version of his young self. The pre-lm versions of the story also imply that Eddie is involved in smuggling immigrants. In these early versions, Eddie is nervous about the arrival of the cousins from the ship and his concern about informants in the neighborhood is not just dramatic irony but also fear given his own involvement in illegal immigration. Privacy - Terms Eddie, brooding and apart from the other longshoremen, under the Brooklyn Bridge Dialogue in the earlier versions of the play conveys a fuller account of migration and the motives of the characters. After Eddie claims that many Italian men who return home after working for several years in America nd their wives have had a couple more children in their absence, Marco insists that surprises like this are few. In one early version Beatrice insists that she knows half a dozen such men with two families. Eddie and Beatrice have two children in this version of the story and there is an implication, in Eddie’s defensiveness, that he might have another family abroad. In this version of the story, Rodolpho also frankly addresses the accusation that he is using Catherine to get citizenship in the United States. Refuting the binary either-or logic used by the immigration authorities to assess the intentionality of migrants and whether they are subverting the law, Rodolpho insists that he came to America seeking economic opportunity and wants to be a citizen so that he can work, but that he also sincerely fell in love with Catherine. Rodolpho: What is this country—a prize? That you only win on your knees? I came to America to work. The same reason he [Eddie] wants to be an American. So I can make myself better before I die…You don’t trust me! You think I only want the papers…But there are no words to say this is a lie…it’s true, when I hold you I hold America also…But if I did not love you Catherine…then I could not have kissed you for a hundred Americas….I want to be an American so that I can work and eat; I want to be your husband so that I can love. It is the same thing, Catherine, there is nothing to deny. (He smiles tenderly—and sardonically): I kiss America. Catherine: No, you’re kissing me; I know. Rodolpho: Both…Both I love. Why not? It’s no crime. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Italian Americans quietly used marriage, adoption, and other family provisions to get around immigration restrictions. Aleri, the attorney who narrates the story in all of the versions of Miller’s play, encapsulates the tentative and partial way that the established Italian American community challenged restrictionist immigration policy at midcentury. On the one hand, Aleri insists that Rodolpho’s intention is unknowable and that it is no crime for him to desire to remain in the country permanently. Aleri is also sympathetic to the desperate need to provide for a starving and sick family that drove Marco to immigrate illegally and to the hard work and sacrices he has made since arriving. Aleri offers to bail Marco out and delay his hearing so that he can work for a few more weeks and send additional money home. On the other hand, Aleri doesn’t challenge Marco’s deportation—the law is the law. Aleri accepts the divide between legal and illegal manners of entering the country. The best he can do is nd selective relief in individual cases like Rodolpho’s that seem “natural” and demonstrate the ability of Italian immigrants to successfully and quickly assimilate. “We settle for half and I like it better that way,” Aleri explains. Lumet’s lm version shifts the emphasis to focus on Eddie’s unruly emotions and threatened masculinity. The lm is a story about illicit sexual desire, betrayal, and desolation, more than it is about migration and freedom. Eddie’s marriage with Beatrice is childless and sexless. Rodolpho’s passionate speech about his combined intentions is shortened. Lumet replaces the discussion of Italian women who wait and men having two families with a claustrophobic scene of the extended family around the dinner table (lmed from above and behind Eddie) and then in the crowded living room (with the camera focused on Beatrice and Marco as they watch Eddie), everyone reluctant to speak or to clap to the music lest Eddie erupt. What discussion there is revolves around Marco and Rodolpho’s travel on shing boats before they came to America—a mobility in sharp contrast to the feeling of entrapment in the Red Hook apartment. While in the original play, Beatrice challenges a sexual double standard, she comes across in the lm as simultaneously subordinated and nervous—using silly small talk as a means of defense—and demanding and unsympathetic to Eddie; she gets and takes much of the blame for all that happens. The scene in the apartment ends with Marco ominously holding a chair over Eddie’s head; Lumet captures, through paired, expressionistically lit close-ups, Eddie’s weakness and Marco’s strength. Eddie comes across as a beleaguered man trying to maintain a control as he loses it, which is emphasized by changing the ending to Eddie’s suicide (rather than his murder by Marco, as in Miller’s play). Rodolpho and Catherine irt, while Eddie looks on ominously Lumet’s Eddie has a lot more to lose than Miller’s. In the beginning of the lm, Eddie is far removed from illegality, violence, and dishonesty as the opening scene on the docks makes clear. Eddie is presented as a man above the dockworkers, called upon to help settle disputes, a leader, close to elder lawyer, Aleri. Eddie’s involvement with submarine smuggling is a thing of the past; the lm makes no mention, as do all the other versions of the story, of any “syndicate.” Eddie asserts his distance from submarines, telling Catherine that he came into the country “in broad daylight, on a quota.” This word is used only in the lm, not in versions of the story by Miller or Rosten. In the lm, Eddie is more insistent that Catherine marry up, interact with “a better class of people,” work in a lawyer’s oce in a neighborhood unlike Red Hook, and look and act like a college girl, all as a testament to Eddie’s sacrice and respectability.

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