On the Waterfront (1954) on Netflix
Approved19541h 48mCrimeDramaThriller
Terry Malloy, a one-time boxer, works the docks for Johnny Friendly's union. When Joey Doyle is killed, Joey's sister Edie and Father Barry press the longshoremen to stand up to Friendly.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb8.1/10181,112 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes99%
Featurette
Plot summary
Terry Malloy, a former prizefighter, works the docks for Johnny Friendly's union, and his older brother Charley works as Friendly's right-hand man. Terry lures Joey Doyle, a dockworker who had agreed to describe waterfront conditions to the Waterfront Crime Commission, up to the tenement roof, believing Friendly's men only mean to talk Joey out of testifying. Joey dies there. His sister Edie, home from college, refuses to leave the neighborhood until she learns why. She and Father Barry, the parish priest, want the longshoremen to speak up. Work is handed out at the pier each morning, and men who cross the union lose their place or worse.
Cast
- Tami Maurielloas Tillio
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about On the Waterfront (1954)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film is widely considered to be Elia Kazan's answer to those who criticized him for identifying eight Communists in the film industry before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952. One of those critics was his friend and collaborator, the playwright Arthur Miller, who had earlier written the first version of the script, titled The Hook.
- Marlon Brando initially declined the role of Terry Malloy, and Frank Sinatra, a native of Hoboken, where the film was being made, then had “a handshake deal” but no formally signed contract to play the part, even attending an initial costume fitting.
- To persuade producer Sam Spiegel that an actor like Marlon Brando could play Terry Malloy more forcefully than Sinatra, Kazan had Karl Malden film a screen test of Actors Studio members Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward performing the love scene between Terry and Edie. Spiegel then agreed to reconsider Brando.
- When Cohn asked that the antagonists be changed to Communists, Miller refused, and Cohn wrote to him saying it was interesting he had resisted Columbia's desire to make the movie “pro-American”. Miller then declined to rewrite the script, and Kazan replaced him with Budd Schulberg.
- At that point a furious Sinatra demanded to be cast instead as Father Barry, the waterfront priest, and it was left to Spiegel to break the news to him that Malden had already been signed for that role.
- The black-and-white film was inspired by “Crime on the Waterfront”, a series of articles by Malcolm Johnson published in November-December 1948 in the New York Sun which won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, though the screenplay by Budd Schulberg is directly based on his own original story.
- Cobb's character of Johnny Friendly was partly modeled on Johnny Dio, a real-life mobster known for his involvement in labor racketeering.
- Film showings at the time produced violent audience reactions, and many theaters had to call in the police to keep order.
