The actress Eva Marie Saint, who died Tuesday at the age of 102, took the movies by storm with her first feature, “On the Waterfront.” In it, she played the stalwart sister of a murdered dockworker. Her moral steadfastness in the role laid the groundwork for a career in which she specialized in sympathetic women who did their best to weather domestic and cultural storms. Here are ten movies that showcase her ability to add complexity and depth to “good woman” types who might seem like stock characters on the page.
On the Waterfront (1954)
Doubling as high-water mark and statement of purpose, Saint’s first feature role won her the Oscar for best supporting actress and established her image as a complex “good woman” type, a moral standard-bearer set against an imperfect world. In “On the Waterfront,” Saint’s character is the first to take the fight to the mob-controlled union responsible for her brother’s murder and her decency both humbles and inspires a dockworker (Marlon Brando) into action. Brando’s groundbreaking performance tends to get most of the attention, but much of his tortured vulnerability comes in response to Saint, whose firm, quiet conviction stirs his slumbering conscience. The film stands as a rousing drama about doing the right thing and a pointed explanation for why the director Elia Kazan decided to “name names” before the House Committee on Un-American Activities two years earlier.
Rent it on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Google Play and YouTube.
‘A Hatful of Rain’ (1957)
Offering itself as “The Lost Weekend” for morphine addiction, Fred Zinnemann’s white-hot melodrama, based on Michael V. Gazzo’s 1955 stage play, doesn’t do much more than cram four actors together in close quarters and turn up the gas. Set largely in a New York City housing project, “A Hatful of Rain” starts with a blowhard father (Lloyd Nolan) paying an unwanted visit to two sons, one of whom is a Korean War veteran (Don Murray) with a faithful wife (Saint) and a nice apartment, and the other of whom (Anthony Franciosa) he considers a loser. What he doesn’t realize is that the good son has a $40-a-day morphine habit and the bad son is going broke trying to keep his shady dealers at bay. Saint stands in the middle of this fireworks display, as her loyalty to her husband is tested by her feelings for his brother.
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‘North by Northwest’ (1959)
Shrewdly cast against type as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s signature icy blondes, Saint first appears in “North by Northwest” as a shifty ally to an advertising executive (Cary Grant) whom a foreign spy (James Mason) and his henchmen have mistaken for another man. As the two flee their pursuers through middle America, eventually leading to a showdown on Mount Rushmore, her hidden motives are revealed, but Saint keeps him (and us) guessing about her loyalties right to the end. Saint and Grant’s chemistry adds an extra spark to Hitchcock’s most robust production, a scaled-up and vastly entertaining spin on the “wrong man” scenario he’d started with “The 39 Steps.”
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‘Exodus’ (1960)
Based on Leon Uris’s novel, the director Otto Preminger and the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s three-and-a-half-hour opus about the founding of the state of Israel casts Saint as the audience surrogate, an American nurse swept up by faraway conflict. Starting at a detention camp in Cyprus, where Jewish survivors of World War II await a United Nations vote on creating a homeland in Palestine, “Exodus” relies on Saint’s naïve and good-hearted widow to lead American viewers through a political transformation. The catalyst here is Paul Newman as Ari Ben Canaan, a Palestinian Jew who commandeers a ship of 600-plus and takes aggressive action to influence the U.N. vote — first by overseeing a hunger strike, then by leading the ship to Palestine. Their eventual romance gives this lumbering history lesson an accessible center.
Stream it on YouTube. Rent it on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV and Fandango at Home.
‘All Fall Down’ (1962)
In the first (and lesser) of the two films she made with John Frankenheimer, Saint plays Echo, one of many casualties to Warren Beatty’s charisma as he breaks the hearts of lovers and family members alike. When Beatty’s drifter, Berry-Berry, comes back into town after spending time in jail for battery, his ineffectual 16-year-old younger brother (Brandon deWilde) is most excited to see him, but his enthusiasm wanes when Berry-Berry takes a romantic interest in Echo, the object of his infatuation. “All Fall Down” is an overheated Southern melodrama in the Tennessee Williams mold, but it has a tragic bent that gets the most out of actors like Saint and Beatty, who transforms himself from a predatory cad to a genuinely pitiable figure.
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‘36 Hours’ (1965)
Three years after “The Manchurian Candidate,” George Seaton’s compact thriller advanced more or less the same scenario of an American officer manipulated by the enemy for diabolical political ends. Here it’s James Garner as a U.S. Army major during World War II who knows the allied forces are going to land at Normandy, but gets knocked out and abducted by the Nazis, who convince him that he’s in an American hospital in 1950. Saint plays a nurse who’s part of this elaborate ruse to get information from him about the invasion, but her reasons for participating complicate her character. “36 Hours” doesn’t have much on its mind, but it’s an effective “Twilight Zone” scenario in which an alternate history is poised to be rewritten.
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‘The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming’ (1966)
In the bigger-is-better ensemble comedy mode of “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming” was acclaimed enough at the time to earn a best picture nomination, largely due to its effort to satirize (and help defuse) longstanding tensions in the middle of the Cold War. Time hasn’t been particularly kind to Norman Jewison’s broad farce about a Russian submarine unit that runs aground outside a quaint New England town, but the performances are lively, especially Alan Arkin and Carl Reiner as, respectively, a Russian lieutenant who pretends to be Norwegian and a vacationing family man who’s unprepared for a Communist invasion. Saint adds to the tension as Reiner’s wife, joining him in the fight to end their long summer getaway.
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video and MGM+. Rent it on Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Google Play and YouTube.
‘Grand Prix’ (1966)
Saint’s second collaboration with John Frankenheimer may be the best gearhead movie ever made, at least when the action is relegated to the urban raceways where Formula One drivers compete for international supremacy. Off the track, however, “Grand Prix” spends a healthy chunk of its three-hour sprawl covering the lives and loves of four drivers, with Saint playing an American journalist who takes up with Yves Montand’s veteran world champ, who happens to be married. But all that drama merely amplifies the stakes of the races themselves, which are filmed with extraordinary eye-level immediacy and a constant sense of imminent danger. Like the best films in Frankenheimer’s peak ’60s run, “Grand Prix” combines stark documentary detail with an immense genre punch.
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‘Loving’ (1970)
Though billed as a comedy, Irvin Kershner’s ironically titled “Loving” lays bare the domestic crises of an era where sexual liberation chipped away at the foundations of traditional marriage. George Segal stars as a commercial illustrator who neglects his wife (Saint) and two children to pursue available women on the side, including the wife of his business partner. There’s a short-story quality to how much Kershner and his screenwriter, Don Devlin, concern themselves with sideline issues — like Segal’s efforts to score a big account — rather than attempt to drive the plot forward. Segal’s philanderer philanders and that’s about it, but the fallout, staged around a child’s walk-in dollhouse at a swinging ’70s party, is pitched beautifully between absurdity and anguish.
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‘Nothing in Common’ (1986)
After taking a 14-year break from acting in features, Saint returned for “Nothing in Common,” a ho-hum comedy-drama notable mainly for Jackie Gleason’s swan song as Max Basner, a cantankerous old salesman who makes demands of his ad-exec son (Tom Hanks) after he loses his job and his marriage. But in the scope of Saint’s career, it’s fascinating to see her leave a bad relationship, rather than suffer alongside flawed, unworthy or put-upon men. As Basner’s wife, she reflects the joy of being unattached before getting drawn back into the touching bedside drama of expressing her misgivings about him and leaving him alone with his regret. That exchange is more authentic than its well-worn story about a young city slicker learning what’s really important in life.
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