There is a guilty secret in his past, and it has something to do with The Seer, a loony, saintly bum who wanders the beach and serenades the dawn. Doc was once a big-league pitcher, and he had twenty-one wins and ten losses when he suddenly quit pitching and moved to Cannery Row.
He provides a sound, solid, dignified performance, and there are times when we even believe he's a real human being who just accidentally wandered into this fantasy. If life were like this, Norman Rockwell would have eclipsed Edward Hopper.ĭoc is played by Nick Nolte, and he is the best thing in the movie. It populates its gigantic and impressive set (an indoor and outdoor replica of the Monterey docks) not only with lovable bums, but also with the requisite hookers with hearts of gold and with a guy named Doc, who dreams of making a breakthrough in marine biology. I doubt, though, that even Steinbeck would be able to believe the extremes to which this movie goes. Writers were always dredging the essential humanity out of the proletariat in the thirties and forties, and John Steinbeck, who wrote 'Cannery Row' and 'Sweet Thursday', the novels that inspired this movie, was no exception. It was made, I suppose, out of a desire to find some larger truth by taking reality and stylizing it into colorful romanticism: To take a bunch of down-and-outers and find the essential humanity in them.
I mention the bums first, not because I think "Cannery Row" has any obligation to provide us with an accurate portrait of skid row, but because they are symptomatic of what is wrong with this movie.
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