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Elia
Kazan’s highly acclaimed multi-award winning On the Waterfront eludes easy classification. An early example of
social realism, it is also deeply felt. The director presents the gritty
reality of the docks of Hoboken, New Jersey, but at the same time he is
battling his own demons. When Marlon Brando’s character says “I was rattin’ on
myself all these years and didn’t even know it,” he speaks as much for Kazan as
he does Terry Malloy. The film comes as a poetic justification, a poignant
apologia for the director, after he had agreed to testify before the House
Un-American Activities Committee, naming names and becoming a pariah among his
former colleagues and friends. Just as the world of Johnny Friendly (Lee J.
Cobb) temporarily seduced the character, so did communism seem appealing to
Kazan for a while, but in the end he was convinced it was an evil that needed
to be opposed. The screenplay fuses realism with the more stylized gangster
film, and ultimately transcends both genres and stands on its own as one of the
best film of its decade, and one of the best American films ever made. Its
message is just as powerful, and the acting just as stirring and convincing
today, as it was more than half a century ago.
