On the Waterfront (Horizon; Columbia) is an attempt by a master director, Elia Kazan, to develop heroic, classic-style drama out of dockside thuggery and union corruption. Kazan succeeds in producing a shrewd piece of screen journalism, a melodrama in the grand manner of Public Enemy and Little Caesar. But he fails to do anything more serious—largely because he tries too hard. In searching for the general meaning in little lives, Director Kazan has trained his lens down fine on small events; he has too often watched his characters through the magnifying glass of special prejudice—the old sentimental prejudice that ordinary people are wonderful no matter what they do.
On the Waterfront has a script that is a work of love and shows it. To the facts presented in Malcolm Johnson's 1949 Pulitzer Prizewinning stories on the New York waterfront (in the late New York Sun), Novelist Budd Schulberg (The Disenchanted) added the results of his own investigations. The product strikes the raucous but curiously subtle pitch of the great port as surely as an octet of harmonizing tugboats.
The mainspring of the action is a murder. A leader of the opposition to a brutal labor czar is cut down before he can testify against the tyrant (Lee J. Cobb). The Orestean hero (Marlon Brando), an ex-pug who has—not quite unwittingly—served as bait in the murder trap, is pursued by the Furies of remorse in the singularly amiable form of the dead man's sister (Eva Marie Saint) and in the sterner shape of a waterfront priest (Karl Maiden).
For a while his fear of reprisal and the herd-honor speak more strongly than his love for the girl and the first dull prickings of conscience. Then one night he finds his own big brother (Rod Steiger), the legal lieutenant of the union boss, dead in an alley because he stood up for junior. And so the ways are greased that send the picture sliding into a blood bath of the sort moviegoers will be wiping off their memories for days.
Brando in this show is one glorious meathead. The gone look, the reet vocabulary and the sexual arrogance are still the Brando brand of behavior. But for once the mannerisms converge, like symptoms, to point out the nature of the man who has them. The audience may never forget that Brando is acting, but it will know that he is doing a powerful acting job.
Beside this almost massive performance, the others, even though good, seem a little small. Rod Steiger, as the brother, is, to the life, the kind of Irish bright boy who can get a little too smart for himself. Eva Marie Saint is quite right, too, in her convent-kept freshness, as the kind of narrow little good girl the bad boys long to be redeemed by. Karl Maiden is bulldoggish as the priest, but hardly conveys the earthy sagacity of the living models the part was drawn from.