On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954): USA
Reviewed by Jameson Macaluso. Viewed on DVD.
On the Waterfront, is director Elia Kazan’s 1954 realistic American drama depicting the violence, corruption, extortion, racketeering and mob rule among the Longshoremen of New York City’s waterfront. Filmed on location across the Hudson River from Manhattan, on the rooftops, in the cargo holds and through the neighborhoods in and around the waterfront of Hoboken, New Jersey, On the Waterfront is based on a series of investigative articles that were written for the New York Sun by Malcolm Johnson.
Marlon Brando stars as Terry Malloy, an ex-prize fighting dockworker and sometime errand boy for mob-connected union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb). For the most part, simple-minded Terry receives easy jobs and preferential treatment due to the fact that is older brother, Charley (Rod Steiger) is one of the men in Friendly’s inner circle. However, when Terry realizes, after the fact, that he was an unwitting accomplice in the murder of a popular dockworker who was set to testify against Friendly before the Waterfront Crime Commission, he struggles with an emerging conscience. For a while, he is able to remain D&D (deaf and dumb), like all the other longshoremen who submit to Friendly’s iron-fisted rule of the waterfront. This changes though, soon after meeting Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint), the slain dockworker’s sister, and the “waterfront priest” Father Barry (Karl Malden) who has resolved to help change things for the longshoremen by standing up to Friendly.
Filmed in black and white in the waning days of the Production Code, this relatively low budget film features what is arguably Brando’s best performance ever. As Terry is coaxed along by Edie, who seems to see more in him than he sees in himself, this brooding character of few words speaks volumes with his body movements and facial expressions. It is as if Brando and this person he’s portraying are one in the same. (Not surprisingly, he earned an Oscar for his performance–one of the eight that the film received overall.) Little by little, Terry becomes aware of his own personal power, and he is increasingly willing to choose good (testifying) over evil (the mob) in this tale of struggle and survival, not only with the union boss who runs the waterfront, but with his own soul, and place in the world.
Terry’s story, and his ultimate quest to do what is right, despite the fear of ostracism by his peers and retribution from Friendly and Co. was intended by Kazan to be analogous to his own real life struggle a couple of years earlier (1952) when he submitted a list to the House Un-American Activities Commission of fellow communist sympathizers, people with whom he had once shared membership in the Communist party. Whether or not he was successful in his bid for understanding, he was successful with this film, as On the Waterfront continues to be heralded as one of the best movies of all time.
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