Background
![](jpg/onthewaterfront-2.jpg) On
the Waterfront (1954) is a classic, award-winning, controversial
film directed by Elia Kazan - a part drama and part gangster film.
The authentic-looking, powerful film is concerned with the problems
of trade unionism, corruption and racketeering. And it is set on
New York's oppressive waterfront docks, where dock workers struggled
for work, dignity, and to make ends meet under the control of hard-knuckled,
mob-run labor unions that would force them to submit to daily 'shape-ups'
by cruel hiring bosses.
To add realism, it was filmed over 36 days on-location
in Hoboken, New Jersey (in the cargo holds of ships, workers' slum
dwellings, the bars, the littered alleys, and on the rooftops). And
some of the labor boss' chief bodyguards/goons in the film (Abe Simon
as Barney, Tony Galento as Truck, and Tami Mauriello as Tullio) were
real-life, professional ex-heavyweight boxers. The low-budget film
brought a depressing and critical, but much-needed message about
society's ills to the forefront, and was hailed by most critics.
The film's morality tale of corruption ends with its
ultimate defeat and the saving of the community by a morally-redeemed
martyr (a common man with a conscience). With a naturalistic acting
style, Marlon Brando portrayed Terry Malloy, an inarticulate, struggling,
brutish hero and small-time, washed-up ex-boxer who took a regrettable
fall in the ring. Now an errand boy and 'owned' by the union boss,
he is unaware of his own personal power. But eventually because of
torment over his actions and his realization of new choices in life,
he joins forces with a tough-minded, courageous and crusading priest
(Malden) and a loving, angelic blonde woman (Saint), a sister of
one of the victims, to seek reform and challenge the mob.
The political and criminal context of the film's background
and history are extremely important. The similarity between Terry
Malloy's whistle-blowing testimony against his own corrupt group
paralleled director Elia Kazan's self-justifying admissions before
the House Un-American Activities Commission (HUAC) two years earlier
(in 1952) as a 'friendly' witness regarding his one-time membership
in the Communist party and the naming of others who were sympathizers.
Kazan attempted to vindicate himself politically with this semi-autobiographical
film - the justification of naming names ('squealing') to expose
the evils of corrupt unions, and the suggestion of sympathy advocated
for squealers.
The film's story was based on New York Sun (now
defunct) newspaper reporter Malcolm Johnson's expose, found in a
series of 24 articles called Crime on the Waterfront. The
series chronicled actual dockside events, labor racketeering in New
York's dockyards, and corrupt practices, and won the 1949 Pulitzer
Prize for Local Reporting. It revealed rampant bribery, extortions,
kickbacks to union officials, payoffs, theft, union-sponsored loan
sharks, murder, and the mob's tyrannical influence on New York's
waterfront. Originally, Kazan had hired playwright Arthur Miller
in 1950 to research the world of longshoremen in Brooklyns
Red Hook area (and use material from Johnson's articles), and craft
a script for a film to be titled The Hook. It had a similar
plot to the 1954 film - the setting of a Brooklyn waterfront with
a militant trade unionist hero struggling with mobsters in the dockworkers
union. The film was never produced, due to HUAC pressure on Columbia
Pictures' studio chief Harry Cohn, who told Miller to change the
villains from corrupt and militant union officials and gangsters
to evil communists, so it would have a pro-American feel
-- but Miller refused and pulled out as screenwriter.
Arthur Miller was replaced by novelist and scriptwriter
Budd Schulberg (another 'friendly' witness before HUAC), who worked
in collaboration with Kazan. The film's plot was taken from Schulberg's
own original story - which reworked all the previous material and
also dropped the Communists in the plot. On the Waterfront emphasized
the waterfront's strict code of "D and D...Deaf and Dumb" --
keeping quiet instead of 'ratting out' or testifying (as a 'friendly'
witness) before a Congressional waterfront crime commission against
bullying union boss Johnny Friendly (an interesting and ironic choice
of names), portrayed by Lee J. Cobb:
[Note: Schulberg based Karl Malden's character on
the tough and profane-mouthed waterfront Catholic priest Father
John M. Corridan, and Pat Henning's character on a Father John
disciple named Arthur Browne. Terry Malloy was modeled after whistle-blowing
longshoreman Anthony De Vincenzo, and Johnny Friendly was based
on mobster Albert Anastasia, chief executioner of Murder, Inc.]
The harsh, naturalistic, well-acted and uncompromising
film was hugely successful, critically and financially. Its budget
of slightly less than $1 million brought in almost $10 million at
the box-office. Boris Kaufman's gritty black and white cinematography
was singled out as superior, and the film received a phenomenal number
of Academy Award nominations - twelve. It won eight Academy Awards
including: Best Picture and Director (Kazan), Best Story and Screenplay
(Schulberg), Best Actor (Brando), Best Supporting Actress (Saint
in her film debut), Best B/W Cinematography (Boris Kaufman), Best
B/W Art Direction-Set Decoration (Richard Day), and Best Film Editing
(Gene Milford). Three of its other four nominations were supporting
acting nods (for a total of four): Best Supporting Actor (Lee J.
Cobb, Karl Malden, and Rod Steiger), and Best Scoring (Leonard Bernstein).
This was the only film that wasn't a musical for which Leonard
Bernstein ever provided the soundtrack.
Plot Synopsis
Following the credits, drumbeats accompany a scene
at the New York waterfront, where a large ocean liner is docked.
The angry gangster union boss, Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) who
callously rules this section of the waterfront, walks up the gangplank
with his mobster entourage from the office (shack) of the Longshoreman's
local Union. Slow-witted, illiterate waterfront bum Terry Malloy
(Marlon Brando) follows behind, surviving as a lackey by running
odd jobs and errands for Johnny and doing strong-arm work.
He is asked to lure to the rooftop of his tenement
building a young dockworker Joey Doyle, one of the informant union
workers who is planning to cooperate with crime investigators by
testifying (before the Waterfront Crime Commission) against gangsters
who tyrannically control the docks. Terry shouts to fellow pigeon-lover
Joey in his apartment, in the opening lines of the film. He unwittingly
becomes a pawn in setting a trap to murder his fellow longshoreman
dockworker:
Joey, Joe Doyle!...Hey, I got one of your birds.
I recognize him by the band...He flew into my coop. You want him?
Terry keeps pigeons in coops on his tenement apartment's
rooftop, and soon convinces potential informant Joey to meet him
on the roof. When he looks up to the rooftop, he sees the dark figures
of two men standing there. Instead of joining Joey on the roof, he
releases his pigeon into the air, and then walks down the street
to a seedy bar, Johnny Friendly's BAR. In front of the corner saloon
is Charley Malloy "The Gent" (Rod Steiger), Terry's smartly-dressed
older brother and manager. Charley, who works as Johnny Friendly's
smart and crooked lawyer and as chief lieutenant, is flanked by two
of Friendly's goons.
In shock, Terry witnesses Joey's murder, as he is hurled
from the nearby rooftop to his death many stories below with a bloodcurdling
scream. One of the thugs coldly states: "I think somebody fell
off the roof. He thought he was gonna sing for the Crime Commission.
He won't." Unknowingly set up, Terry is stunned by the murder,
believing that the racketeers (and his brother) would only threaten
the man:
I thought they was gonna talk to him...I thought
they was gonna talk to him and get him to dummy up...I figured
the worst they was gonna do was lean on him a little bit...Wow!
He wasn't a bad kid, that Joey.
Two of the thugs make a joke about the 'squealer'
who has threatened to 'sing' to the crime commission and break the
waterfront's unspoken code to be 'D and D' (Deaf and Dumb):
A canary.
Maybe he could sing but he couldn't fly!
In the street, a shocked crowd gathers around Joey's
body. Introduced characters are local parish priest Father Barry
(Karl Malden) who delivers the last rites, Joey's father Pop Doyle
(John Hamilton), and Joey's fresh-faced sister Edie (Eva Marie Saint).
One of the neighbors, Mrs. Collins (Anne Hegira) knows this was no
accident: "Same thing happened to my Andy five years ago...(about
Joey) He was the only longshoreman that had the guts to talk to them
crime investigators ... Everybody knows that." Pop laments that
his son didn't follow his advice: "Kept telling him. Don't say
nothin'. Keep quiet. You'll live longer." Angered by the senseless
murder of the brother she was close to, Edie screams: "I want
to know who killed my brother!"
In the rough waterfront bar where some of the patrons
watch a prizefight on a TV above the bar, Big Mac (James Westerfield)
the waterfront hiring boss, brings beer-drinking Johnny Friendly
a thick wad of bills, revealing union racketeering, corruption, strong-arm
tactics and payoffs: "Here's the cut on the shape-up. Eight
hundred and ninety-one men at three bucks a head, that's, uh, - twenty-six
seventy-three...We got a banana boat at 46 tomorrow. If we could
pull a walk-out, it might mean a few bucks from the shippers. Them
bananas go bad in a hurry." Friendly responds sharply: "Ask
two G's." A whole network of runners for Friendly's mob are
in the bar including a weasel-like banker nicknamed "J.P." Morgan
(Barry Macollum) and another conniving mobster named Skins (Fred
Gwynne).
As a man in his 30s who is exploited like a pawn by
others, ex-prizefighter and has-been Terry knows that he owes his
waterfront career and livelihood to Johnny Friendly, head of the
racketeers, and to his brother Charley, although he was forced to
take a 'fall' in a boxing fight. But he also realizes that he is
dull-witted and inarticulate, and not even capable of accurately
counting a wad of bills. Big Mac good-naturedly comments on Terry's
lack of education:
The only arithmetic he ever got was hearing the referee
count up to ten.
But Terry is hot-tempered, and reacts harshly to the
criticism. Charley excuses his brother's a-typical behavior: "It's
just the Joey Doyle thing. You know how he is. He exaggerates the
thing. Just too much Marquis of Queensbury. It softens 'em up."
Johnny raises his voice and explains how he became
head of the local union and continues to maintain a lucrative (but
illegal) operation. He also calmly rationalizes to Terry about the
death of Joey Doyle - a waterfront dockworker who might have threatened
the entire business:
When I was sixteen, I had to beg for work in the
hold. I didn't work my way up out of there for nuthin'...You know,
takin' over this local took a little doin'. There's some pretty
rough fellas in the way. They gave me this (he displays an ugly
scar on his neck) to remember them by...I got two thousand dues-payin'
members in this local - that's $72,000 a year legitimate and
when each one of 'em puts in a couple of bucks a day just to make
sure they work steady - well, you figure it out. And that's just
for openers. We got the fattest piers in the fattest harbor in
the world. Everything moves in and out - we take our cut...You
don't suppose I can afford to be boxed out of a deal like this,
do ya? A deal I sweated and bled for, on account of one lousy little
cheese-eater, that Doyle bum, who thinks he can go squealin' to
the Crime Commission? Do ya? (pause) Well, DO YA?
Terry is given "a present from your Uncle Johnny," a
fifty-dollar bill, and then promised a prime work area at the docks
at the next morning's shape-up:
"Put Terry up in the loft. Number one. Every day. It's nice, easy
work, you see. You check in and you goof off on the coffee bags. OK?" Charley
reinforces Johnny's kind gesture to his brother with a warning: "Hey,
you got a real friend here. Now don't forget it."
Up on his rooftop at daybreak the next day, Terry
tells a fourteen-year old neighborhood boy named Tommy (Thomas Handley)
that he thinks his pigeons have the life:
Boy, they sure got it made, huh? Eatin'. Sleepin'.
Flyin' around like crazy. Raisin' gobs of squabs.
The faint sound of ship's whistle brings Terry back
to reality and he hurries to the docks, where hundreds of men mill
around on the pier. [The film effectively uses authentic sounds from
its environment: foghorns, ship's whistles, etc. to heighten the
realism.] Some of the longshoremen are muttering about the unfortunate
Doyle death, because he "couldn't learn to keep his mouth shut."
Two of Friendly's goons threaten Timothy J. "Kayo" Dugan
(Pat Henning):
"Why don't you keep that big mouth of yours shut?...What are you,
a wise guy?"
Dugan replies: "If I was wise, I wouldn't be no longshoreman for
thirty years. I'm poorer now than when I started." Pop Doyle passes
the mantle of Joey's jacket to Kayo.
While waiting for the morning's work, Terry is approached
by Glover (Leif Erickson) and Gillette (Marty Balsam), representatives
from the Waterfront Crime Commission. The commission is "getting
ready to hold public hearings on waterfront crime and underworld
infiltration of longshore unions." When questioned by them about
what he knows, being the last one to see Joey alive, Terry pleads
ignorance:
I don't know nothin', I ain't seen nothin', I'm not
sayin' nothin'.
At the 8 am whistle announcing the shape-up at the
pier entrance (for 5 gangs and 100 banana carriers), Big Mac calls
forward men to work for the day. Terry Malloy is favored and one
of the first to be called. From the side, Edie and Father Barry watch,
as he tells her: "This is my parish. I don't know how much I
can do, but I'll never find out unless I come down here and take
a good look for myself." When Big Mac is surrounded by the men,
he throws the work tabs over their heads, causing a mad, animalistic,
free-for-all scramble.
Terry meets the sister of the murdered union worker
when he grabs a tab that Edie's father had seen first. When she wrestles
with him for the tab, he first teases her, withholding the tab from
her. But when he learns she's
"Joey Doyle's sister," he gives her the working tab. She
gives it to her humiliated father so he can work. Father Barry asks
the rejected men who have been denied work: "What do you do now?...Is
this all you do, just take it like this?...Huh? What about your union?" He
is told that the lawless local union is mob-controlled by Johnny Friendly: "The
waterfront's tougher, Father, like it ain't part of America." Father
Barry offers the men "the bottom of the church" as a safe
haven so that they can discuss their grievances - it can be one place
where it's safe to talk.
At work, Charley finds Terry lying comfortably on a
pile of coffee bags while reading a photo magazine filled with bikini-clad
women. He sends Terry on an "extra detail" to sit in on
tough, insistent Father Barry's meetings (with the "Doyle girl")
that he is organizing in his parish to expose union racketeering.
Terry is to keep "a run-down" on the "names and numbers
of all the players." Terry argues that he doesn't want to stool,
but Charley straightens him out:
Let me tell you what stooling is. Stooling is when
you rat on your friends, the guys you're with. Johnny wants a favor.
Don't think about it. Do it.
In the church meeting with only a handful of longshoremen
in attendance, Father Barry speaks out against the controlling power
of the mob and stands up for moral principles against the corrupt
bosses. He preaches about the reality of the situation:
Isn't it simple as one, two, three? One. The working
conditions are bad. Two. They're bad because the mob does the hiring.
And three. The only way we can break the mob is to stop letting
them get away with murder.
He attempts to determine who killed Joey Doyle, asking: "Who
killed Joey Doyle?" The reaction to the Father's question is
total silence - the men either look down, blankly stare away, or
look embarrassed. Then the priest asks a second, more pointed question: "How
can we call ourselves Christians and protect these murderers with
our silence?" Terry sits at the back of the parish during the
meeting, viewed suspiciously: "The brother of Charley the Gent.
They'll help us get to the bottom of the river." Father Barry
cuts through the talk and returns to the crucial question:
Now listen. You know who the pistols are. Are you
going to keep still until they cut you down one by one? Are ya?
The priest is told by Kayo Dugan that there is a code
of silence, called
"D 'n D" on the docks: "Deaf and dumb. No matter how
much we hate the torpedoes, we don't rat." Father Barry persuasively
argues that they must break the code of silence and testify, but he
feels defeated when the men don't respond to his words:
There's one thing we've got in this country and that's
ways of fightin' back. Gettin' the facts to the public. Testifyin'
for what you know is right against what you know is wrong. Now
what's ratting to them is telling the truth for you. Now can't
you see that? Can't you see that?
The meeting is suddenly broken up when rocks shatter
the church windows. As Father Barry pairs off the men, Terry suddenly
grabs Edie and leads her to safety down a fire escape. Thugs who
wield long clubs and baseball bats mercilessly ambush and beat the
men.
Walking Edie home through a park, Edie asks Terry about
where his affiliation lies:
Edie: Which side are you with?
Terry: Me? I'm with me, Terry.
After he identifies his self-interest, Terry is confronted
for a handout by an old rummy, one-armed derelict longshoreman named
Mott Murphy (John Heldabrand). The man recognizes Edie and Terry,
and accuses him of being there the night Joey was killed. Although
bought off by the toss of some coins by Terry, Murphy spitefully
calls him a "bum." Terry tells Edie to pay no attention
to the "juice-head" who hangs around the neighborhood. |