On the Waterfront [Criterion Collection] [Blu-ray]

Director: Elia Kazan

Overview

Winner of eight Academy Awards including "Best Picture," this film deals with labor union racketeering on the New York docks in the 1950s. After an ex-prizefighter dockworker becomes involved in a murder ordered by a corrupt union official, he falls in love with the victim's sister, leading to violent consequences.

Product Details

Release Date:	02/19/2013
UPC:	0715515101516
Original Release:	1954
Rating:	NR
Source:	Criterion
Region Code:	A
Presentation:	[B&W, Wide Screen]
Language:	English
Time:	1:48:00
Sales rank:	8,524

Special Features

Disc one: ; New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack; Alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS-HD master audio; Audio commentary by authors Richard Schickel and Jeff Young; New conversation between filmmaker Martin Scorsese and critic Kent Jones; Elia Kazan: an outsider (1982), an hour-long documentary; New documentary on the making of the film, featuing interviews with scholar Leo Braudy, critic David Thomson, and others; New interview with Eva Marie Saint; Interview with director Elia Kazan from 2001; Contender: mastering the method, a 2001 documentary of the film's most famous scene; New interview with longshoreman Thomas Hanley, an actor in the film; New interview with author James T. Fisher about the real-life people and places behind the film; Visual essay on Leonard Bernstein's score; Visual essay on the aspect ratio; Trailer; ; Disc two:; Alternate presentations of the restoration in two additional aspect ratios: 1.85:1 (widescreen) and 1.33:1 (full-screen); ; Plus: ; A booklet featuring an essay by filmmaker Michael Almereyda, Kazan's 1952 defense of his House Un-American Activities Committee testimony, one of the 1948 Malcolm Johnson articles that inspired the film, and a 1953 piece by screenwriter Budd Schulberg

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Marlon Brando	Terry Malloy
Eva Marie Saint	Edie Doyle
Karl Malden	Father Barry
Lee J. Cobb	Johnny Friendly
Rod Steiger	Charley Malloy
Pat Henning	`Kayo' Dugan
Leif Erickson	Glover
James Westerfield	Big Mac
Tony Galento	Truck
Tami Mauriello	Tillio
John Heldabrand	Mott
Rudy Bond	Moose
Don Blackman	Luke
Arthur Keegan	Jimmy
Abe Simon	Barney
Barry Macollum	J.P.
Mike O'Dowd	Specs
Martin Balsam	Gillette
Fred Gwynne	Slim
Thomas Handley	Tommy
Ann Hegira	Mrs. Collins,madame Collins
Pat Hingle	Bartender
Nehemiah Persoff	Cab Driver
John F. Hamilton	Doyle,"Pop" Doyle
Dan Bergin	Sidney
Zachary Charles	Actor
Jere Delaney	Actor
Michael V. Gazzo	Actor
Katherine MacGregor	Actor
Rebecca Sands	Police Stenographer
Tiger Joe Marsh	Actor
Leonard Bernstein	Composer

Technical Credits

Budd Schulberg

Malcolm Johnson

Robert Siodmak

Budd Schulberg	Screenwriter
Sam Spiegel	Producer
Malcolm Johnson	Screenwriter
Richard Olson	Sound Effects
Robert Siodmak	Screenwriter
James Shields	Sound/Sound Designer

Editorial Reviews

Nobody in Hollywood except director Elia Kazan wanted to make On the Waterfront and they're still fighting about it over a half-century later. When Kazan first started pitching Budd Schulberg's story about life and death on the New Jersey docks, even 20th Century Fox -- which had allowed him to make fiercely realistic and gritty movies dealing with anti-semitism (Gentleman's Agreement), the threat of a bubonic plague epidemic in New Orleans (Panic In The Streets), and the life of a Mexican revolutionary (Viva Zapata) -- wouldn't go near the story about union corruption. Every studio was fearful of what Hollywood and allied unions might do if word got around that someone was making a movie on that subject. Kazan, however, was lucky enough to find producer Sam Spiegel, who had a contract to make films for Columbia independent of Harry Cohn's veto. Between the two of them and Schulberg, and with Marlon Brando in a role previously earmarked for Frank Sinatra, they came up with a movie that confronted audiences with the brutality and corruption that permeated much of the labor movement in the United States and the fact that people in very high places benefitted from that corruption. More than that, or the savagery of the action, On the Waterfront became a source of unending vexation in Hollywood's political wars. Kazan had been branded an informer for "naming names" of suspected Communists and Communist sympathizers before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and On the Waterfront, with its story of a corrupt union stooge who informs on his former organization, was taken as Kazan's defense of his actions. It became the only cinematically respected anti-Communist film ever to come out of Hollywood. It wasn't perfect by any means -- the ending is too neat and unbelievable -- but it stood as a landmark of realistic, topical filmmaking, carrying a load of personal and ideological messages that are still being fought over a half-century later, as witnessed by the controversy surrounding the presenting of an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement to Kazan in 1998. Bruce Eder