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Seventy years ago this month, On the Waterfront exploded onto movie screens in theatres across America, garnering eight Oscars including for Best Picture. The film is especially timely in light of the short-lived strike that temporarily shut down ports along the East Coast.
This “art imitating life” post-war film, was based on twenty-four Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Sun articles, “Crime on the Waterfront,” by Malcolm Johnson, catalyzing a New York State Crime Commission investigation.
The film, directed by Elia Kazan, features Marlon Brando in a career-defining role, playing dockworker Terry Malloy, whose rising boxing career is cut short when powerful local mob boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), persuades him to throw a fight. After he becomes friends of Edie (Eva Marie Saint), in a tender scene marking the start of their relationship, Edie’s longshoreman brother is murdered so he cannot testify to the Commission about Friendly's control of the Hoboken, New Jersey waterfront.
Another crucifixion
Fiery, street-smart Father Barry, played by Karl Malden (and inspired by a real priest, Fr. John M. Corridan), goes to the dock after another longshoreman is killed, and lays it on the line, speaking by the side of the worker’s lifeless body.
“Some people think the crucifixion only took place on calvary. They better wise up.”
When someone throws rocks at him and shouts, “Get back to your church, Father,” the priest replies:
“Boys, this is my church and if you don’t think Christ is down here on the waterfront you’ve got another guess coming.”
Pelted with an egg, he continues after Terry implores them to “let him finish”:
“Every morning when the hiring boss blows his whistle, Jesus stands alongside you in the shape of you. He sees why some of you get picked and some of you get passed over. He sees the family man worried about getting rent and getting food in the house for the wife and the kids. He sees you selling your souls to the mob for a day’s pay.”
Terry takes it all to heart and teams up with Edie and Fr. Barry, determined to testify himself, though Friendly's lawyer, Terry's older brother Charley (Rod Steiger), advises against it.
A film of "contenders"
As he’s warming up for the fight, Friendly tells him the score, prompting his brilliant “I could have been a contender” speech to his brother, one of the most famous in film history.
Besides Brando and Malden, the film also features extraordinary performances by Saint and Steiger, on opposite sides, as she fights to avenge the death of her brother with every ounce of her being and Steiger urges his brother to go along to get along. All studied under Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio and its pioneering “method” and ensemble acting, a key part of the film’s architecture — that, and Kazan’s perfect direction, graced by Boris Kaufman’s exquisite cinematography framing Budd Schulberg’s poignant screenplay, all five (excluding the deserving Malden and Steiger) winning Oscars for their work.
Leonard Bernstein’s soul-searing score brilliantly ties it all together, though, as, throughout his career, Oscar also eluded him.
But the message of the film eludes no one. In the final scene, the would-be prize fighter delivers a knockout punch, powerfully played by Brando, after he is severely beaten by Friendly’s hoodlums. All bloodied, Terry gets up like a boxer who has been dealt a seeming knockout punch. Encouraged by Fr. Barry to “finish what you started,” he starts walking.
Then, like Christ, he falls, then picks himself up, and makes it to the dock, where the union chief, greeting him, yells, “All right, let’s go to work!”
