An ex-prize fighter turned New Jersey longshoreman struggles to stand up to his corrupt union bosses, including his older brother, as he starts to connect with the grieving sister of one of the syndicate's victims.
Presented on 35MM!
Dockworker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) had been an up-and-coming boxer until powerful local mob boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) persuaded him to throw a fight. When a longshoreman is murdered before he can testify about Friendly's control of the Hoboken waterfront, Terry teams up with the dead man's sister Edie (Eva Marie Saint) and the streetwise priest Father Barry (Karl Malden) to testify himself, against the advice of Friendly's lawyer, Terry's older brother Charley (Rod Steiger).
"It is one of the most powerful American movies of the 50s, and few movies caused so much talk, excitement, and dissension -- largely because of Marlon Brando's performance as the inarticulate, instinctively alienated bum, Terry Malloy." - Pauline Kael
"On the Waterfront is strong, tough and cruelly violent, but it is also a film that should make theatre history for 1954." - Boston Globe
" Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront is a significant, almost a definitive, example of a type of film which traditionally finds Hollywood at its most expert: the melodrama with a stiffening of serious ideas, the journalistic expose of crime and corruption." - Sight & Sound