On the Waterfront [Criterion Collection] [Blu-ray]

Director: Elia Kazan Elia Kazan

Overview

This classic story of Mob informers was based on a number of true stories and filmed on location in and around the docks of New York and New Jersey. Mob-connected union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) rules the waterfront with an iron fist. The police know that he's been responsible for a number of murders, but witnesses play deaf and dumb ("plead D & D"). Washed-up boxer Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) has had an errand-boy job because of the influence of his brother Charley, a crooked union lawyer (Rod Steiger). Witnessing one of Friendly's rub-outs, Terry is willing to keep his mouth shut until he meets the dead dockworker's sister, Edie (Eva Marie Saint). "Waterfront priest" Father Barry (Karl Malden) tells Terry that Edie's brother was killed because he was going to testify against boss Friendly before the crime commission. Because he could have intervened, but didn't, Terry feels somewhat responsible for the death. When Father Barry receives a beating from Friendly's goons, Terry is persuaded to cooperate with the commission. Featuring Brando's famous "I coulda been a contendah" speech, On the Waterfront has often been seen as an allegory of "naming names" against suspected Communists during the anti-Communist investigations of the 1950s. Director Elia Kazan famously informed on suspected Communists before a government committee -- unlike many of his colleagues, some of whom went to prison for refusing to "name names" and many more of whom were blacklisted from working in the film industry for many years to come -- and Budd Schulberg's screenplay has often been read as an elaborate defense of the informer's position. On the Waterfront won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor for Brando, and Best Supporting Actress for Saint.

Product Details

Release Date:	02/19/2013
UPC:	0715515101516
Original Release:	1954
Rating:	NR
Source:	Criterion Collection
Region Code:	A
Presentation:	[B&W, Wide Screen]
Language:	English
Time:	1:48:00
Sales rank:	8,329

Special Features

Disc one: ; New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack; Alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS-HD master audio; Audio commentary by authors Richard Schickel and Jeff Young; New conversation between filmmaker Martin Scorsese and critic Kent Jones; Elia Kazan: an outsider (1982), an hour-long documentary; New documentary on the making of the film, featuing interviews with scholar Leo Braudy, critic David Thomson, and others; New interview with Eva Marie Saint; Interview with director Elia Kazan from 2001; Contender: mastering the method, a 2001 documentary of the film's most famous scene; New interview with longshoreman Thomas Hanley, an actor in the film; New interview with author James T. Fisher about the real-life people and places behind the film; Visual essay on Leonard Bernstein's score; Visual essay on the aspect ratio; Trailer; ; Disc two:; Alternate presentations of the restoration in two additional aspect ratios: 1.85:1 (widescreen) and 1.33:1 (full-screen); ; Plus: ; A booklet featuring an essay by filmmaker Michael Almereyda, Kazan's 1952 defense of his House Un-American Activities Committee testimony, one of the 1948 Malcolm Johnson articles that inspired the film, and a 1953 piece by screenwriter Budd Schulberg

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Marlon Brando	Terry Malloy
Eva Marie Saint	Edie Doyle
Karl Malden	Father Barry
Lee J. Cobb	Johnny Friendly
Rod Steiger	Charley Malloy
Pat Henning	`Kayo' Dugan
Leif Erickson	Glover
James Westerfield	Big Mac
Tony Galento	Truck
Tami Mauriello	Tillio
John Heldabrand	Mott
Rudy Bond	Moose
Don Blackman	Luke
Arthur Keegan	Jimmy
Abe Simon	Barney
Barry Macollum	J.P.
Mike O'Dowd	Specs
Martin Balsam	Gillette
Fred Gwynne	Slim
Thomas Handley	Tommy
Ann Hegira	Mrs. Collins,madame Collins
Pat Hingle	Bartender
Nehemiah Persoff	Cab Driver
John F. Hamilton	Doyle,"Pop" Doyle
Dan Bergin	Sidney
Zachary Charles	Actor
Jere Delaney	Actor
Michael V. Gazzo	Actor
Katherine MacGregor	Actor
Rebecca Sands	Police Stenographer
Tiger Joe Marsh	Actor
Leonard Bernstein	Composer

Technical Credits

Budd Schulberg

Malcolm Johnson

Robert Siodmak

Elia Kazan	Director
Budd Schulberg	Screenwriter
Sam Spiegel	Producer
Malcolm Johnson	Screenwriter
Richard Olson	Sound Effects
Robert Siodmak	Screenwriter
James Shields	Sound/Sound Designer

Editorial Reviews

A gritty melodrama brimming with brilliant performances and seething with anger and desperation, On the Waterfront made a big splash in 1954, three years after its director Elia Kazan and star Marlon Brando had teamed up to film Tennessee Williams' A Street Car Named Desire. The story focuses on the collision between a corrupt union controlling the New Jersey port and one of its rank-and-file members, a boxer turned stevedore, Terry Malloy (Brando). The film solidified Brando's status as the king of American method acting. His famous "I coulda been a contender" monologue, spoken in the back of a taxi where his character confronts his older brother Charlie (Rod Steiger), is practically revered as a sacred text. The essence of cool, Brando's incomparably masculine style combined a sexy, knowing swagger with wry humor, jazzy timing and an aching vulnerability. The film boasts several other outstanding performances, including Karl Malden's outspoken priest and Lee J. Cobb's nasty union boss, while Leonard Bernstein's magisterial music contributes richly to the film's over-the-top naturalism. Bernstein's work earned an Academy Award nomination, one of 12 for the picture, which cleaned up on Oscar night with eight wins.

Barnes & Noble - Monica McIntyre

Arguably the best movie ever released by Columbia Pictures and among the finest movies ever made in America, On the Waterfront's reputation has only grown across the half-century since its release. Based on a series of articles about corruption on the New York/New Jersey docks, with a story and screenplay by Budd Schulberg (who also wrote a novel, Waterfront, to tell the story without the compromises necessary for the screenplay), the movie -- directed by Elia Kazan -- retains the feel of truth from the first frame to the last, down to the smallest nuances of the supporting players. Longshoreman Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) is a washed-up ex-boxer who is a part-time stooge for corrupt union president Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), who also employs Terry's older, college educated brother Charley (Rod Steiger). As a favor to Johnny, Terry lures a fellow dockworker, Joey Doyle, to the roof of his building -- and Joey is thrown off the roof. All of the men who knew him plead "D & D" (deaf-and-dumb) about who killed him or why, but they all know that Joey was going to answer questions before the Waterfront Crime Commission investigating racketeering on the docks, and that it was Johnny Friendly who had him killed. But Terry can't walk away from Joey's death that easily -- he genuinely thought they were just going to lean on him a little, not kill him, and he can't forget that he set Joey up. Terry's conscience bothers him just enough so that when he meets Joey's grieving sister, Edie (Eva Marie Saint), and sees Father Barry (Karl Malden), the local priest, trying to find out who killed Joey, they stir some long-buried streak of decency in him. At the same time, although he's not the brightest bead on the rosary (and this is a very Catholic movie, in its imagery and sensibilities), Terry slowly becomes aware that he can tie Johnny Friendly directly to the killing. Johnny starts to doubt Terry and his willingness to keep quiet; Terry and Edie are seen together too often, and they are falling in love with each other, albeit very reluctantly -- even Terry's brother Charley can't reach him anymore. When another longshoreman, Kayo Dugan (Pat Henning), agrees to testify and is murdered, Terry is the next in line for the investigators (Leif Erickson, Martin Balsam). Terry turns out not only to have a conscience but some dignity and self-worth. In the renowned taxi-ride scene with his brother (considered possibly the best dramatic scene between two actors in the whole history of movies), he recounts how Charley never looked out for him when Charley and Johnny handled him as a boxer and made him throw his most important fights -- he's not dead, but he's barely a shadow of who and what he might've been. By this time, the middle ground Terry is standing on is shrinking down to a point -- with a piercing edge -- and he (who is worrying only about himself) has to decide which way he's going to jump off. When Charley is murdered, he makes his decision, precipitating an explosion of pent-up fury on the docks that threatens to destroy both Terry and Johnny. The acting in On the Waterfront has the aura of truth, and the decision to shoot on location in northern New Jersey gave the film the immediacy and realism of a documentary. Into that mix goes Leonard Bernstein's music (his only film score), which anticipates elements of West Side Story and, in its editing and mixing into the audio track, imparts a very subtle operatic quality to the otherwise hyper-realistic film. Just check out the interaction of the visuals and the music in the scene depicting the fight at the morning shape-up, especially the build up to the horn flourish at the moment when Terry's friend points out that he's fighting with Joey Doyle's sister. The film is an extraordinary mix of elements both coarse and refined -- harsh realism and art at its most quietly elegant -- in a coherent and compelling whole that still holds up a half century later. On the Waterfront won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor for Brando, Best Supporting Actress for Saint, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, and Best Editing.

All Movie Guide - Bruce Eder

Nobody in Hollywood except director Elia Kazan wanted to make On the Waterfront and they're still fighting about it over a half-century later. When Kazan first started pitching Budd Schulberg's story about life and death on the New Jersey docks, even 20th Century Fox -- which had allowed him to make fiercely realistic and gritty movies dealing with anti-semitism (Gentleman's Agreement), the threat of a bubonic plague epidemic in New Orleans (Panic In The Streets), and the life of a Mexican revolutionary (Viva Zapata) -- wouldn't go near the story about union corruption. Every studio was fearful of what Hollywood and allied unions might do if word got around that someone was making a movie on that subject. Kazan, however, was lucky enough to find producer Sam Spiegel, who had a contract to make films for Columbia independent of Harry Cohn's veto. Between the two of them and Schulberg, and with Marlon Brando in a role previously earmarked for Frank Sinatra, they came up with a movie that confronted audiences with the brutality and corruption that permeated much of the labor movement in the United States and the fact that people in very high places benefitted from that corruption. More than that, or the savagery of the action, On the Waterfront became a source of unending vexation in Hollywood's political wars. Kazan had been branded an informer for "naming names" of suspected Communists and Communist sympathizers before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and On the Waterfront, with its story of a corrupt union stooge who informs on his former organization, was taken as Kazan's defense of his actions. It became the only cinematically respected anti-Communist film ever to come out of Hollywood. It wasn't perfect by any means -- the ending is too neat and unbelievable -- but it stood as a landmark of realistic, topical filmmaking, carrying a load of personal and ideological messages that are still being fought over a half-century later, as witnessed by the controversy surrounding the presenting of an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement to Kazan in 1998. Bruce Eder

All Movie Guide