On The Waterfront

1954    108 min.

The Making of On the Waterfront

When I had the pleasure of working with composer Leonard Bernstein in the mid-1970s, I remember asking him why On the Waterfront was his only film score (apart from the films made of his Broadway musicals). The film is one of my favorites, and I’m a big fan of the score, which contributes to it an extra degree of edginess, elegance, and epic quality. He described dramatically what hard and heartbreaking work it had been. He hated composing a coherent piece of music, and then seeing it re-edited by someone else who wasn’t a musician, to serve another master, the film. Although when one watches the movie today, the score seems perfect and intentional just the way it is, it’s only in the concert form that Bernstein’s vision for the music is whole, and was satisfying to him.

And in fact, to my mind, the brilliance of the performances, the score, and the cinematography all serve the deeper truths of the underlying story, its archetypal characters, and how that is brought to life by Budd Schulberg’s screenplay and Elia Kazan’s directing. This is what makes On the Waterfront the great American film that it is, because this is what sets its bar so high.

From the beginning, it was a collaboration between Schulberg and Kazan. Kazan had already directed A Streetcar Named Desire, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Viva Zapata! and Gentleman’s Agreement. His stock in Hollywood would have been completely at the top if he hadn’t ratted out his colleagues (especially Arthur Miller) to the House Un-American Activities Committee a few years earlier. It was a seemingly inexplicable decision for a man to make - a man who was essentially a liberal, and remained a liberal - and to this day, it remains a controversial moment in Hollywood history.

At first, he’d approached Schulberg about doing a film on the Scottsboro Boys. Budd Schulberg had grown up in Hollywood, surrounded by the movies, the son of a Paramount film executive. His 1940s bestseller, What Makes Sammy Run? had been an expose of sorts, showing the life of a ruthless Hollywood tycoon. He’d written for several films (including, uncredited, on the script for the Janet Gaynor/Frederick March A Star is Born and on Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent) before going on to become a series writer for the Golden Age of Television drama show The Philco Television Playhouse.

The Scottsboro Boys project was quickly replaced by another idea; a project had been suggested to do a film adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize winning series of articles on "Crime on the Waterfront" by journalist Malcolm Johnson. Schulberg began to do his own first-hand research on the docks of New York City, and the story of On the Waterfront started to emerge, with many of the characters based on the real people he met there. The priest, Father Barry, in particular, was based on Father John Corridan, who worked out of St. Xavier’s, in the dangerous Dunn-McGrath neighborhood. He risked his life every day, and understood completely the lingo, the economics, and the day-to-day situation of the waterfront insurgents, intervening wherever possible in the interests of peace. When Schulberg brought Kazan down to meet him, Kazan had to ask Schulberg, "Are you sure this guy’s really a priest?"

Ultimately, in exploring the New York/New Jersey waterfront, they investigated 750 miles of shoreline, with 1800 piers, handling 10,000 ships a year, carrying over a million passengers and over 35 million tons of foreign cargo with a value of around $8 billion - much of it finding its way into the pockets of several mob families. Kazan and Schulberg took their lives in their hands, as "Brownie," the man who would become the character Kayo Nolan in the film, showed them around, inventing a cover story for their safety - that they were fight promoters who had met him at a boxing gym.

Pounding out drafts and re-writes of the script at Schulberg’s Pennsylvania farm and Kazan’s New York apartment, they ended up with something they were happy with. Kazan assumed On the Waterfront would be made by Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox, where he was under contract to deliver a film, but both Kazan and Schulberg were amazed and disappointed when the man who had, less than twenty years earlier, made The Grapes of Wrath, called them into his office, and after raving about how wonderful wide-screen, Technicolor extravaganzas were, told them he didn’t like a single thing about their script. "You’ve written exactly what the American people don’t want to see!"

Every other studio in Hollywood turned it down too. They all wanted Kazan to direct something for them, as long as it wasn’t that. But he swore he’d do the film, if he had to shoot it himself with a 16mm news camera - which was almost what happened.

Finally, United Artists agreed to a budget of a half million dollars when Frank Sinatra said he’d star, but it wasn’t enough money. Kazan wanted Brando, who had turned the role down at first, and he needed a larger budget. He pitched it to Columbia’s producer Sam Spiegel while Spiegel was half asleep in bed early one morning. Okay, Spiegel said, if Brando would do it, Columbia Pictures would fund the film to the tune of $800,000, which was the magic number - low, but do-able. Any additional budget money would come out of Kazan's pocket.

Brando was finally convinced - mostly because Kazan had pushed for him to get the role of Stanley in the film version of Streetcar  which had plunged him into stardom. Brando owed him one. With Brando in place, Kazan cast the rest of the film, also mostly from the renowned Actor’s Studio: Lee J. Cobb, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger, and the great character actor, Martin Balsam. For the role of the young innocent girl, Schulberg and Kazan thumbed through the industry standard reference guide, the Players’ Guide Directory, until they found the face they wanted - and gave television actress Eva Marie Saint her big screen debut at age 30.

The film was shot on location, with the mob’s eyes never far away, and tensions high. It was a cold winter, and much of the film was shot in freezing temperatures on the Hoboken, New Jersey side of the docks, with the wind coming off the Hudson River. The bars were the real bars, the piers were the real piers. That’s what gives the film its uncompromising feel and what gave the Method actors on set the physical inspiration they needed to give the performances of a lifetime.

Ultimately, Waterfront’s triumph is what any great film’s triumph should be, and what so few films attain Ð a perfect balance between all the elements. In the moment when the film ends and the lights come up, you, as an audience member, know something has been stirred in both your heart and your intellect by the artistry you’ve seen, as well as the  conscience of the thing; there is a complete sense of rightness about the piece as a whole. No moment is out of place, no nuance is out of tune.

We can certainly listen to Bernstein’s score performed in the concert hall, or in our living room on a recording, and that way we can hear it intact, as he meant it to be heard. But whenever we do, it will still transport us out of the room, and remind us always of the great moments of the film. As we listen, we can close our eyes and see them, unreeling again and again.

--- Kenn Rabin

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