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The excellent acting, however, is surpassed by Boris Kaufman's photography. Seldom has the brick implacability of a workingman's neighborhood stood staring in such an honest light—the tenement phalanx, the sad little parks, the ugly churches. And coloring it all is the pale chemical air of the big city. Over the docks in the morning, when the longshoremen gather stamping in the cold for the daily shape-up, washes the pale fog from the Hudson. And as the men gather, and dissolve, and arrange again, their faces settle into friezes as noble and grave as any ever painted on a tomb.
Hollywood has several kinds of producers: those who work for the big studios, mostly on assignment; shoestring producers, who work for themselves and would sometimes profit more by producing shoestrings instead of pictures; and top-drawer independents, usually identifiable by their imagination, willingness to gamble on offbeat stories—and for a slightly hunted look because they never know where their next million is coming from.
Sam Spiegel, one of the top independents, has all the characteristics except the hunted look. Since he launched The African Queen, directed by John Huston and starring Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart (TIME, Feb. 25, 1952), Spiegel has had little trouble in lining up his financing; all he need do now is exercise his facility for latching on to a good script, director and cast. His latest catch: On the Waterfront (see above).
Austrian-born Sam Spiegel, 50, came to the U.S. in 1927 as a lecturer on European drama at the University of California. In a year or so, he was in the movie business; his first U.S. film, an episodic story called Tales of Manhattan, was produced in 1942. It was then that he made a semipermanent change in his name. "We were sitting in the steam room at 20th Century-Fox," he explains, "and someone said there shouldn't be quite so many foreign names [on Tales of Manhattan]. There wasn't one good English name on it. They started it as a joke and said: 'Why don't we take your name and cut it down to S. P. Eagle?' For a while thereafter, I was S. P. Eagle."
Filming On the Waterfront in the New York dock area gave Eagle-Spiegel some of the biggest headaches of his career. When the company rented five adjacent tenement rooftops in Hoboken. the landlord of building No. 3 decided he wanted more money. At first Spiegel tried to fight by shooting around No. 3, but finally "everybody compromised," i.e., the landlord got his money. At another point, Spiegel hired a saloon for nighttime shooting at $150 a night; after one evening's shooting, the saloon owner raised his fee to close to $1,000. Spiegel, committed to the set, had to shell out again. Word soon got around that Spiegel was a walking mint, and there was no stopping scores of eager petty grafters and local officials who drifted on to the set for rake-offs. In all, this monetary soup kitchen added an extra $30,000 to the Waterfront budget. Says Spiegel in astonishment: "We never had this trouble when we were filming The African Queen . . . But the princes in Africa are lesser blackguards than they are in some places on the waterfront."