On the Waterfront

Remembering his first encounter with this seminal 50s masterwork, director Martin Scorsese recalled “the faces, the bodies, the way they moved . . . the voices, the way they sounded. They were like the people I saw every day. It was as if the world that I came from, that I knew, mattered.”

The film is rightly famous for Marlon Brando’s definitive performance as Terry Malloy, a New York dockworker (and once a promising boxer) who loses faith in his union and his smarter but corrupt older brother Charlie (Rod Steiger) after a whistleblower is murdered. As a rationale for naming names during the McCarthy era the movie is blatantly self-serving. Directed on location with staggering fervor by Elia Kazan, On the Waterfront is not American neo-realism, not quite, but in Boris Kaufman’s concrete greys, on the rooftops, and in the actors’ breath in the cold winter mornings the film transcends its blunt ideological premise through the sensitivity of its playing… Without this movie we’d probably never have had Mean Streets or Raging Bull, The Godfather or The Wire… It gives us De Niro, Pacino, and all their ilk… More than that, it gives us a portrait of ourselves, striving to take our place on the screen.

The acting and the best dialogue passages have an impact that has not dimmed; it is still possible to feel the power of the film and of Brando and Kazan, who changed American movie acting forever.

Roger Ebert