An ex-fighter is caught up in the waterfront gangs after the death of his brother.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: NR
Release Date: 23-OCT-2001
Media Type: DVDMarlon Brando’s famous “I coulda been a contenda” speech is such a warhorse by now that a lot of people probably feel they’ve seen this picture already, even if they haven’t. And many of those who have seen it may have forgotten how flat-out thrilling it is. For all its great dramatic and cinematic qualities, and its fiery social criticism, Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront is also one of the most gripping melodramas of political corruption and individual heroism ever made in the United States, a five-star gut-grabber. Shot on location around the docks of Hoboken, New Jersey, in the mid-1950s, it tells the fact-based story of a longshoreman (Brando’s Terry Malloy) who is blackballed and savagely beaten for informing against the mobsters who have taken over his union and sold it out to the bosses. (Karl Malden has a more conventional stalwart-hero role, as an idealistic priest who nurtures Terry’s pangs of conscience.) Lee J. Cobb, who created the role of Willy Loman in Death of Salesman under Kazan’s direction on Broadway, makes a formidable foe as a greedy union leader. –David Chute
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March 5, 2010
#1
There are 2 types of people who like black and white films: old people and clever clogs know-it-alls. Why watch this when you can buy Picture Perfect with the lovely Jennifer Aniston for the same price. The emperor’s new clothes!
March 5, 2010
#2
Another victim of the bewildering practice of forcing older movies to be shown in the useless black and white format; knowing that computers can add vibrant colors to these movies, and that studios fail to take advantage of it, is extremely saddening. There are likely thousands of new viewers (who, like me, can’t stand black and white) who will be turned off by this close-minded practice.
Let’s all band together and tell the studios what we want: classic movies looking as good as possible! And in bright, beautiful colors!
March 5, 2010
#3
This is one of so many movies that is foolishly and blindly overrated. Citizen Kane is also on that list.
It has some drama to it, but the lack of realism turns it into a silly movie.
In the big finish, the great triumph of the Church and the little man, Brando simply gets up from a beating and walks on his own two feet to report to work. What idiocy. What can that solve. Absolutely nothing.
And yet the premise of the movie is that by walking to work, Brando is taking the corrupt union leadership down. Some idiot in the background makes it clear, just in case we didn’t get the point, by saying “now we can run the union on the up and up”. Haha, what a joke.
Brando’s little walk at the end is purely symbolic and will do not a damn thing to change the union leadership. It’s just a Hollywood happy ending, a triumph of good over evil, of non-violence over murder. Sure. Actually a triumph of Hollywood silliness over honest standards of truth and sense in movies.
As pure entertainment, it falls short too. There is just too much depression and futility. It’s not worth the agita. And it is all wrapped up so nicely at the end, isn’t it. If you have any sense at all you realize that the mob will kill Brando soon enough, so what difference does it make that he is allowed to work one day? None at all. He’s dead meat. What kind of happy garbage are we being fed?
March 5, 2010
#4
Can you all really be talking about the same movie I saw? The photography was drab, the dialogue pretentious, I could see the plot developments coming two miles away, Cobb’s Johnny Friendly was as one-dimensional as Boris Badenoff, and I can’t believe Eva Marie Saint got an Oscar for daring to go without makeup. What guts! As for Brando, His face was made up so that he was supposed to look like a fighter who’d taken one too many punches, but all he looked like was an actor with too much makeup. His Method interpretation was so self-conscious, so narcissistic, that he didn’t seem to be truly aware that anyone else was ever in a scene with him. And come on, after the beating he takes, he’s going to get up and stagger all the way to the factory gates — and THEN also go to work? with every rib broken? And by the way, I’m sick of cigarette smoking, beer drinking priests in movies. This one does it, and so did The Exorcist. I’ve never known a priest who did these things, and why the Catholic Church would give public approval to such roles is a mystery to me. Kazan ratted on his peers and ruined careers and lives, and this was his valentine to himself for that horrible act. I for one was not entertained.
March 5, 2010
#5
Plus a lot of outdoor scenery in that on location. Gives it realism. Look if this movie had been made in a Hollywood studio it would of been only half as good. Brando did well but he’s vastly overrated here on this site. There really isn’t any swearing or other 3dimensional behavior by characters in film. I think for sure it was a combination of elements more than just MB himself.