Director Elia Kazan sparked controversy when he “named names” before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. His On the Waterfront, a film about a dock worker informing on union corruption, was widely interpreted as a justification of his actions. The film’s Best Picture Oscar—voted by the members of the Academy—thus seemed to vindicate not merely Kazan’s artistic vision but his political activities as well.
Having won the New York Film Critics, National Board of Review, and Golden Globe Awards
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Despite its triumph, Kazan’s film had had to overcome serious obstacles. No major studio had been interested in a story about corruption among longshoremen and mob violence in New York—especially one to be shot relatively quickly on a budget of less than $900,000, when the trend in Hollywood was in favor of big-budget, Technicolor films shot in the new wide-screen process of CinemaScope. Moreover, On the Waterfront’s writer and director were men who had been implicated in the notorious “witch hunt” of professed or suspected communist sympathizers by the House Committee on Un-American Activities
On Oscar night, March 30, 1955, at the RKO Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, California, On The Waterfront collected its eight awards, wresting the Best Picture statuette from conominees The Caine Mutiny (1954), The Country Girl (1954), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), and Three Coins in the Fountain (1954). The film was in a strong sense Kazan’s reply to his critics—including former friend Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, and others—who had vilified Kazan for his testimony before HUAC in 1952. Kazan had named ex-colleagues as Communist Party members or associates, adding their names to the notorious blacklist and destroying many careers and lives. He was attacked by liberal newspaper columnists, as well as his fellow writers and actors. However, what to others seemed an unforgivable betrayal became for Kazan a point of patriotic honor, because he believed he was trying to save the United States from communist infiltrators.
Despite his controversial status, Kazan was determined to make a film based on a series of twenty-four articles published in the New York Sun in 1949. The series by investigative reporter Malcolm Johnson, “Crime on the Waterfront,” was an exposé of the graft, extortion, kickbacks, theft, and killings that were common on the New York waterfront. Johnson, who won the Pulitzer Prize
The rights to Johnson’s story were owned by Kazan’s friend Budd Schulberg. Schulberg, the author of the best-selling novel What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), was a former Stalinist like Kazan. Also like Kazan, he had rejected Joseph Stalin and embraced capitalism. Schulberg had already written a screenplay entitled The Bottom of the River that was based on the Johnson source material. It was never filmed.
In 1950, before he teamed up with Schulberg, Kazan had hired Arthur Miller to research the world of longshoremen in Brooklyn’s Red Hook area and to write a script to be called The Hook for Columbia Pictures
Schulberg’s first draft, called The Golden Warriors, was sent to producer Darryl F. Zanuck
In due course, a final script (then titled simply Waterfront) was readied, and Kazan was able to sign Marlon Brando for the lead role of Terry Malloy, although the actor at first rejected the role without reading the script. Brando no longer wanted to work with Kazan, who had directed him on stage and film in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (play, pr. 1947; film, 1951). Brando’s initial objection was political; he disapproved of Kazan’s testimony against his supposed friends and colleagues before HUAC. Ironically, however, when Brando eventually relented, his performance rendered not merely sympathetic but also immortal a fictional character whose experience bore obvious parallels to that of Kazan.
On The Waterfront is a taut drama about Terry Malloy, a retired boxer who runs errands for the Dockers Union, a mob-controlled organization that mercilessly exploits workers and then intimidates them into keeping silent about the mob’s criminal activities. Malloy finds himself unwittingly involved in the murder of Joey Doyle, though he falls in love with Doyle’s sister Edie. His conscience begins to bother him, and he balks at further involvement in the union, putting him, his older brother Charley (who is a henchman of union boss Johnny Friendly), Edie, and her father at deadly risk. Eventually, Malloy confesses his guilt to Edie and Father Barry, and after a brutal beating by Friendly’s thugs, he musters the courage to testify before the Crime Commission and break the mobster’s control of the docks.
On The Waterfront helped bring a new sense of realism
Kazan multiplied this verisimilitude by casting former professional heavyweight boxers as bodyguards and goons, alongside professional actors who were masters of method acting. Brando, for example, improvised brilliantly, setting an unparalleled standard for realist acting that combined inarticulate stumbling with poetic brooding and vulnerability. His scene with Rod Steiger in the back of a taxi became a classic, and their dialogue exchange—included the line “I coulda been a contender,” has been quoted countless times in the years since the film’s release.
With an anger and passion that still holds, the film was able to transcend its inherently melodramatic material, Christian symbolism, and moments of blaring emptiness. It powerfully consolidated Kazan’s preoccupation with the subjects of corruption and the wrongly accused, a preoccupation that was already evident in his Boomerang (1947) and that would surface again in A Face in the Crowd (1957). Deemed “culturally significant” by the Library of Congress, On the Waterfront was voted eighth on the American Film Institute’s list of the one hundred greatest American movies of 1896 to 1996.
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Kazan, Elia. A Life. New York: Knopf, 1988. A candid autobiography full of anecdotes and gossip, with an insider’s look into the genesis and making of the film and of the political controversy surrounding Kazan. -
Neve, Brian. “On the Waterfront.” In The Movies as History: Visions of the Twentieth Century, edited by David Ellwood. Stroud, Gloucestershire, England: Sutton, 2000. Argues that the film is more than just a naked apology for Kazan and Schulberg’s decision to inform on their colleagues. -
Rapf, Joanna, ed. On The Waterfront. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. A comprehensive examination, with essays on the screenplay, Kazan as director, Bernstein’s score, the reception of the film in classrooms, and contemporary reviews. Preface by Schulberg. -
Schickel, Richard. Elia Kazan: A Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Substantial discussion of every stage and film production directed by Kazan. Sympathetic to Kazan.
Kazan Brings Naturalism to the Stage and Screen
Blacklisting Depletes Hollywood’s Talent Pool
HUAC Investigates Hollywood
A Streetcar Named Desire Brings Method Acting to the Screen
McCarthy Hearings
The Crucible Allegorizes the Red Scare Era