On the Waterfront

Pigeons and hawks in Hoboken, a muckraking opera. "Wanna hear my philosophy of life?" The heightened pitch is promptly announced with racketeers pouring out of a cabin dwarfed by a docked liner, a bulbous black sedan awaits them across the gangplank. (Leonard Bernstein's score begins with noble French horn and flute before giving way to pounding drums, later on a pile-driver takes over, appropriately.) "Underworld infiltration of longshore unions" is the case, "deaf and dumb" in the face of thuggish intimidation is the norm. Amid the choruses of plug-uglies is the soulful meathead in need of growing up, made at once massive and lithe by Marlon Brando's incomparable frankness. He's an unwilling tool in the capo's (Lee J. Cobb) slaughter of a whistleblower, the awakening in the darkness is guided by the pale glow of the dead man's sister (Eva Marie Saint). "Conscience. That stuff can drive you nuts!" The pungent approach is amalgamated from film noir and Grand Guignol, to it Elia Kazan adds fulsome studies of Roma Città Aperta and La Terra Trema. The priest who sees crucifixions everywhere (Karl Malden) ascends in a crane out of the ship's cargo hold, the protagonist's brother (Rod Steiger) is described as "a butcher in a camel hair coat" and last seen as meat hanging from a hook. Ditch ambition and maybe live a bit longer, shrugs the palooka with a rooftop sanctuary, then the tremendous moment of clarity in the back of a taxi, an elegy for missed opportunities and fraternal love. A hysterical Via Dolorosa is just the finale for Kazan's messy blur of defiance and guilt in the wake of his own unforgivable act. "I'm just gonna go down there and get my rights." Among the numerous inheritors are Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well and Lumet's Prince of the City. Cinematography by Boris Kaufman. With Leif Erickson, Pat Henning, Martin Balsam, James Westerfield, Tony Galento, John F. Hamilton, Fred Gwynne, Pat Hingle, Nehemiah Persoff, Rudy Bond, Tami Mauriello, and Arthur Keegan. In black and white.