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Denver Post (15/Jul/1995) - In defense of Hollywood Eva Marie Saint censures censorship

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In defense of Hollywood Eva Marie Saint censures censorship

Anything that brings Eva Marie Saint to town is a good deal. She's smart and charming; she's blessed with a good memory; and her still-active movie career, which began with "On the Waterfront" in 1951, includes several of the finest movies of the past 50 years.

Saint worked for directors Elia Kazan ("On the Waterfront") and Alfred Hitchcock ("North by Northwest"). She co-starred with Marlon Brando and Cary Grant. She studied with Lee Strasberg at the famed Actors Studio (recently the subject of a Bravo cable series), the school of method acting where Brando, Paul Newman, Marilyn Monroe, Dennis Hopper, Shelley Winters and dozens of other great actors trained.

Saint came to Denver last week to promote the cable station American Movie Classics and in general to speak up for the movies. The first thing she had to say — with nary a hitch nor a stammer — was directed at Sen. Bob Dole, who's been bemoaning the state of American movies in what he hopes will be a steppingstone to the White House.

"Films aren't all down the toilet as Dole says. The violence is worse (than it was), so I just choose not to see it. I don't like censorship."

She also doesn't dislike all violence.

"I liked "Pulp Fiction' a lot. My husband turned away a few times — especially at the scene with the needle in the heart — but one of us had to watch. I thought the relationships between the men and the women were quite beautiful. We ought to get rid of the guns (on the street) before we get rid of the movies."

Probably no two Hollywood directors differed so greatly as Kazan and Hitchcock. Kazan was interested in politics. He tended toward avant-garde approaches to drama and acting. He worked frequently with Tennessee Williams and put both Brando and James Dean in their first major films.

Hitchcock liked men in suits and women in dresses. His '50s films, big Technicolor productions compared to Kazan's gritty black and white films, were about people old enough to be established in life. Hitchcock grew interested in middle-aged lovers, like the graying Stewart in "Rear Window" and "Vertigo" and the mature Cary Grant in "North by Northwest."

Also in the '50s, Hitchcock took established actors — Grant, Stewart — and turned up the pressure of unexpected circumstances on their familiar characters.

"Quiet, internal director"

Saint described Kazan, a co-founder of the Actors Studio, as "a quiet, internal director. He pushes the right buttons for an emotional response."

Kazan and Strasberg believed that the root of acting lay in one's emotional history. When a part calls for a certain reaction, the method actor finds something similar in his own life and uses that memory as the basis of his performance.

But, said Saint, "My dad was a Quaker. We didn't show anger or tears. But Strasberg showed us pretty fast. It was hard to cry in front of my peers — and when I did it was a real breakthrough."

"Hitchcock was external. He never talked about the emotion of the scene. He'd say things like, "Lower your voice. Don't use your hands. Look right at Cary Grant.'

"Each scene (with Hitchcock) was designed (in advance), but within that you had total freedom. For Hitchcock, the whole thing was the story board (the director's sketch of a scene before it was actually filmed)."

Hitchcock is famous for his comment "Actors are cattle," which he later amended to "Actors should be treated like cattle." Saint, though, said it didn't work out that way on the set.

"Hitchcock loved actors," she said. "He instilled in you the belief that you were the only one who could play the part."

In "North by Northwest," Saint's classy character attends an art auction. During a break in the shooting, Saint went for a cup of coffee, but Hitchcock didn't want Saint's character to drink from the standard paper cup, so he ordered a china cup for her coffee.

She added that Hitchcock was a man who for himself had special bacon flown in from Denmark.

Strasberg and Kazan sound artsy and ethereal compared to the hard-nosed Hitchcock, but Saint said Strasberg also had a practical side. She was performing in a production of Chekhov's "The Seagull" at the same time that she had a regular, and paying, job doing commercials for Admiral televisions. The contradiction gave her trouble.

"I talked to Lee, who said, "This (the Actors Studio) is where we study. That's the real world, and you have to make money for the rent."'

In one of the ads, Saint had to pull up a "rabbit ears" antenna on the top of the television set (this was the '50s) and say a line that still makes her grit her teeth: "Even a woman can do it."

"But I couldn't make it work. I did better with Chekhov that day."

On location with Brando

I had interviewed Saint several years ago, and what I remembered most was her description of Marlon Brando, a man often described as difficult. But Saint had said that during the shooting of "On the Waterfront" he'd gone out of his way to help this first-time actor.

The location was Hoboken, N.J., and after work each day, Brando escorted Saint to the ferry and walked her home. When I mentioned this to Saint, the light in her eyes grew even brighter than it was.

"He gave me his coat one day. He was wonderful — the prince of all princes. You feel like his nerve endings are all exposed. He was always sensitive to your mood and the surroundings.

With a wistful tone she said that they didn't see each other much after the filming.

"People think that (if actors have worked together) you stay in touch. You don't."