In 1954, On the Waterfront swept the Oscars (11 nominations, 8 wins) and it still remains listed on everybody’s list of the best films ever made. Shot for just under $1M, the film was also a box office success. It was directed by Elia Kazan and it stars Marlon Brandon, Karl Malden, Lee J. Cobb, Rod Steiger, and Eva Marie Saint in her first movie role. It is often listed at the top of Marlon Brando’s greatest performances, and that’s a tough list to top.
This is not a pretty movie; it is grim and gray and shot in black and white. The exteriors were shot at the docks of Hoboken, New Jerey in the winter. You feel cold and grimy watching it. But the musical score was by Leonard Bernstein, the cast is phenomenal and it’s one of those films that is about an idea more than a love story or an adventure or a plot to destroy the world. It’s an intellectual film even though the characters are a bunch of poorly educated dock workers, some of whom are likely illiterate. They’re just trying to get a paycheck in an inhospitable and corrupt world.
The characters in the film are mostly longshoremen, the tough beer-drinking men who work the ports loading and unloading ships. The main character is Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) who had aspirations as a prize fighter until he agreed to take a dive at the behest of his brother in order to help a local mob boss. What seemed at the time to be a small favor to a powerful man ruined Terry’s boxing career. When the movie starts, Terry is resigned to working the waterfront, until the day he inadvertently witnesses a murder. The victim is Joey Doyle, a guy who raises pigeons on the roof of his apartment building in his spare time; it was thought that Joey Doyle might want to snitch on the local mob bosses.
Joey Doyle’s sister Edie gets the local priest involved to try to find out who killed her brother and winds up striking up an uneasy romantic relationship with Terry, not realizing that he knows who murdered her brother. The priest (Karl Malden) delivers a speech in which he literally preaches Christ and resurrection—something no modern film would do. In fact, what lured me to rewatch this classic film was the fact that it has a pretty unvarnished, direct Christian message to it. This is one of those films you could not make today, at least not the same way.
Now the rest of the story is sometimes billed as a crime drama. The priest and Edie want to get justice for the dead dock workers; the union workers know more than they’re saying, but they’re scared to speak against the union bosses. No one knows that Terry Molloy witnessed the murder, least of all Edie who gently eases into a mismatched but serious romantic relationship with Terry. The once-promising prize fighter Terry Molloy does not want a piece of this fight at all. He wants to pretend he doesn’t know anything. He finds himself at an uneasy impasse, until he is called to testify.
This causes Terry to consider the totality of his life. He had been duped by his brother and the mob into ruining his career as a prize fighter. Now he’s just a dock worker at the mercy of the mob bosses/union guys for work. He wonders if it was worth it. He wonders what on earth he’s protecting.
The story was set in the McCarthy era when so many Hollywood types found themselves accused of un-American activities. Now I happen to think McCarthy was onto something when he went communist hunting in Hollywood in the 1950s, but the backdrop of the story does not have to be the Hollywood black lists. It occurs in any situation where a person can get cancelled or maybe even destroyed for speaking the truth. The director of On the Waterfront, Elia Kazan, was one of the guys who testified against Hollywood people for McCarthy.
In other words On the Waterfront is relevant today, particularly in light of cancel culture. How long do we go along?
Marlon Brando’s portrayal of Terry Malloy, including his immortal scene in the taxicab where he tells his brother who urged him to throw the most important fight of his career, “I could have been a contender!” is beyond masterful. Actors still study him. Terry is a complex character, which is all the more remarkable because he is a man of few words. Sometimes his scenes involve minimal action. He often observes rather than reacts, and that is very hard to convey as an actor. At the start of the film, he rarely pondered the future. His seems to have accepted a very tightly circumscribed life and has no dreams beyond the docks of Hoboken. Yet a slow romance with Edie makes the guilt bubble up: she is seeking to find who killed her brother and he knows. She doesn’t know he knows. And while Terry had nothing to do with the murder, he had everything to do with the murderers getting away with it.
Eva Marie Saint made her film debut as Edie Doyle and took home a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. A few years later, she’d star in North by Northwest by Alfred Hitchcock. She is practically the only woman in this film and the only person with an education. Her widowed father wants to protect her while she is home from college; he is distressed she is hanging around with Terry Malloy but like fathers of grown daughters everywhere, there is a limit to what he can do.
The film conveys a sense of people trapped in a small grim, gritty neighborhood. The world is a big place but these characters never leave the waterfront, never abandon their back-breaking, day-labor existence, never venture beyond the ships and the local gin mill. As the lyrics of Hotel California go, they are prisoners of their own design.
Edie stands out as the only character with a life beyond the waterfront. She had been sent her off by her struggling family to be educated at a Catholic school to become a teacher. Edie’s father had sacrificed to give his daughter a better life, and she is well aware of the debt of gratitude she owes him. She is on vacation visiting the old neighborhood when her brother is killed, and she almost does not want to go back to her old life. It suggests that the waterfront of Hoboken was like some sort of terrible vortex, a place that drew people who had other chances, other opportunities, and plunged them into a relentlessly hard life of disappointment and unarticulated despair.
There are a lot of unspoken questions in this film. Edie’s father could get the money together to educate his daughter. Couldn’t he have managed to move, even to a different part of town? Couldn’t he have figured a way out of this dead-end back-breaking day labor? Terry Malloy was a decent prize fighter, but his career abruptly ended after taking a dive. Granted, it was a bad career move, but did it have to end his career? Even the mob bosses who leech off the dock workers could have found fatter pickings elsewhere. But everyone was glued to a grimy, gray tract of Hoboken where they were broken, battered, and abused. Edie is the one character who symbolizes that there is life beyond Hoboken, but when she returns home, she does not want to go back to that better life. She wants to stay in Hoboken.
Misery not only love company, misery loves to stay put.
What a lot of people don’t see in the film is that this work was Elia Kazan’s statement—perhaps to himself more than to the world—as to why he testified against some of his Hollywood commie coworkers in the McCarthy era. Kazan got called by the committee to speak out. Many people in Hollywood who were likewise summoned did not obey. To testify was to be a “rat.” In his own words, Kazan said he realized that he did not want to protect the people he was asked to speak against. Kazan even wrote in his memoirs that On the Waterfront was his own story. When Terry Molloy stands up to the unions, it was Elia Kazan talking to the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Some people resented Kazan for making this movie because Kazan was a known “rat,” and rats were not supposed to make movies about being rats, especially good movies, and most especially good movies about noble rats. Terry tells one of the union bosses in the film that they can call him a rat for ratting on the bosses, but in reality, Terry had been ratting on himself his whole life. In other words, the mob guys (who ran the unions) were guilty of worse betrayals of the longshoremen than the other way around.
Another interesting note. The film’s producer, Sam Spiegel, wanted Frank Sinatra to play the role of Terry Malloy and Elia Kazan was agreeable since Hoboken was Sinatra’s home town and he had the accent down. They were even talking wardrobe when Spiegel had a change of heart and swapped out Sinatra for Brando. The motive was money: the film could get a bigger bankroll with Brando in the lead compared to Sinatra. In 1954, Brando was a bigger name. Apparently, Sinatra bowed out without much fuss.
Many of the longshoremen in the film are played by actual Hoboken dockworkers at the time who took the gig to play as extras.
There are people who try to poke holes in this film: it is unrealistic, it ennobles snitches, it is not a fair depiction of what it means to testify against others. But they’re wrong. This is a great film about a great subject. It’s true that the snitch—the guy who tells the authorities what they want to know—must walk a lonely and troubled road. But it’s also true that sometimes the snitches are the good guys. The people who refuse to be rats often just perpetuate injustice and misery. Terry Malloy got to the point that he wanted to see justice for Johnny Doyle. Was it because he was in love with Johnny’s sister? Was it because he resented his failed career as a prize fighter? Was it because he couldn’t see his way out of the situation he was in? Who knows?
Ultimately, people who must take action do not always have clean, easily interpreted motives. We all have multiple and sometimes contradictory ideas about life, and we do what we do for high-minded causes and low-minded interests. The movie ends with some dramatic action, and we see that sometimes people do things they don’t even understand for reasons they could never explain. Elia Kazan said this movie was about him, so you know it’s about paying a price to be true to your values. And it was a big middle finger to the Hollywood reds.
This is a great film. It’s particularly glorious because a lot of Hollywood types wanted this movie to fail. But when it broke box office records, they were willing to accept the receipts and keep their yaps shut.