The French reception of Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) constitutes a revealing case study in cultural relations between France and the United States during the Cold War, demonstrating how procedures of demystification may remystify the ideological object they critique. In an American context, On the Waterfront is widely regarded as a particularly overdetermined film, combining a literal politics of labour relations with an allegorical apologia for McCarthyism. French reactions to the film set out to decode its multiple subtexts from an outsider perspective but sometimes end up reproducing the film's mystifications at another level. Thus the French reception demonstrates both an assimilation and distancing of the film in political terms, an aesthetic rejection of the film from the different quarters of Brechtian dramaturgy and auteur theory, a popular embrace of the film through its insertion into a changing celebrity culture, and a misunderstanding or disavowal of its gendered subtext.
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