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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. Monica McIntyre

All Movie Guide

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

Product Details

• UPC: 043396784093
• Source: SONY PICTURES
• Region Code: 1
• Aspect Ratio: Pre-1954 Standard (1.33.1)
• Presentation: B&W
• Sound: Dolby Digital, monaural
• Language: English, Français
• Subtitles: English, Español, Français, Portugais, Korean, Thai
• Time: 1:47:00
• Sales Rank: 805

This DVD is also available as part of a box set:

• Marlon Brando Collection
• On the Waterfront / Wild One
• Columbia Best Pictures Collection

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