On the Waterfront

On the Waterfront is one of the most honored American films. It portrays life on the docks of New York Harbor, specifically Hoboken on the New Jersey side, with a great deal of fidelity to the substance of waterfront life and the people involved in it. It deals with themes of corruption and injustice, but it does not fully depict the multicultural aspects of working life on the waterfront, and this absence may be connected to when the film was made.

The film's origins lie in a series of articles published in the New York Sun between November 28, 1948, and February 4, 1949. The Sun's editors assigned their reporter, Malcolm Johnson, a story about the murder of a hiring boss at the docks, and Johnson expanded the story into an exposé of waterfront crime and the complicity of the International Longshoremen's Association in waterfront crime, winning a Pulitzer Prize for the series. Soon afterward, novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg was asked to write a script based on this series. Schulberg did further investigation on the issues presented by Johnson. When the rights to the script reverted to Schulberg, he and director Elia Kazan began to construct a film, as the New Jersey waterfront became known for assaults and mob activity. On the Waterfront was released in July 1954.

On the Waterfront stars Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy, a failed boxer who has a job on the docks through the influence of his union-connected brother (Rod Steiger). The union is run with an iron fist by Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb). Malloy runs an errand that gets one of his friends, Joey Doyle, killed (for testifying to the Crime Commission). The rest of the film shows how Malloy eventually stands up to Johnny Friendly by testifying and by enduring a ferocious beating, all with the help of Joey's sister (Eva Marie Saint) and a principled waterfront priest (Karl Malden), a character based on a real-life person, Father John Corridan, the priest at St. Francis Xavier Church on the Lower West Side of Manhattan. At the Academy Awards for 1954, On the Waterfront won Oscars for Best Picture, Art Direction, Cinematography, Directing, Film Editing, and Writing; in addition, Marlon Brando won Best Actor, and Eva Marie Saint won Best Supporting Actress.

Although history tells us that the waterfront has traditionally been one of the most multicultural worksites in the United States, especially as described in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, On the Waterfront erases the ethnic variety of its subject matter. Every speaking character in the film has an Irish surname, and the priest uses the phrase “potato-eater” to describe himself.

A year after the film was released, Schulberg, who had done a prodigious amount of research on the screenplay and understood that a lot of his material did not make it onto the screen, wrote a novel that encompassed the subjects and action of the screenplay. It expanded the character of the priest and provided a thicker description of the environment in which the film had taken place. He did more with the multicultural nature of the docks, referring to the Russian caps, the Italians, and the African Americans seen at the shape-up, the daily assembly of stevedores hoping to receive assignments from the union managers who distributed labor to load and unload the ships waiting at the docks.

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