Apropos of nothing political…and only because I referenced “On The Waterfront” in the previous blog….
As you certainly know if you have ever seen this great Elia Kazan classic movie, the priest was played by Karl Malden – the fine academy award winning actor (not for this movie, though – the one he won for is at the bottom of the blog) who most people remember as Mike Stone in “The Streets of San Francisco” TV series.
Mr. Malden, who died in 2009 at the hefty age of 97, was of Serbian and Croatian ancestry. His real name was Mladen Sekulovich, and he created his stage surname of “Malden” by simply transposing the “a” and “l” of Mladen.
Mr. Sekulovich changed his name to the more marquis-accommodating Karl (his grandfather\’s name) Malden at the age of 22. But he always yearned to see his real name somewhere, somehow, in a movie.
By the time he got the role of the priest in “On The Waterfront”, Malden was a major actor and therefore had some clout. So he asked that, since there were members of a waterfront union in the movie, and guys like that often had ethnic names, could his birth name be one of them. The answer was “sure”.
That is why, during the scene I quoted in the previous blog, when the union big shots are told by the investigative committee to raise their hands when their names are called. one of them answers to “Mladen Sekulovich”.
And which union delegate raised his hand as Karl Malden\’s real-name counterpart? A very young Fred Gwynne.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot: what was Karl Malden\’s academy award-winning role? He won the best supporting actor award in 1951 for playing Stanley Kowalski\’s friend Mitch in “A Streetcar Named Desire”.
Ok, back to politics, where sometimes I fight off the desire to see a bunch of those guys standing in front of that streetcar. Between stops.
