The Criterion Collection

Frank Sinatra was originally cast as Terry Malloy, On the Waterfront’s longshoreman protagonist; the production even got as far as costumes with him in the role. Producer Sam Spiegel had always really wanted to get Marlon Brando for the part, but Brando had returned the script unread—twice. In the end, Spiegel successfully guilt-tripped Brando by making the case that he owed his stardom to director Elia Kazan, who had cast him in A Streetcar Named Desire a few years earlier. Sinatra was said to hold a grudge for the rest of his life, and repeatedly called Brando “Mumbles.”

The character of the activist priest in the film, Karl Malden’s Father Barry, came almost lock, stock, and barrel from a real-life crusader named Father John “Pete” Corridan, of the Xavier Labor School on Manhattan’s West Side. Malden even took Corridan’s own hat and coat to wear in the role, buying him new ones to replace them.

Brando’s contract stipulated that he was allowed to leave the set every day at 4 p.m. to attend sessions with his psychoanalyst. As a result, he did not read his lines to Rod Steiger when it came time to film Steiger’s close-ups during the famous taxicab scene; Kazan did instead. Steiger took umbrage, and relations between the two actors remained frosty for decades.

Brando’s early departures weren’t as big a problem as they might have been, as his costar Eva Marie Saint also needed to leave the set. She would take the subway to her Greenwich Village apartment, cook dinner, and then head uptown to Broadway, where she was costarring with Lillian Gish in Horton Foote’s A Trip to Bountiful.

Screenwriter Budd Schulberg became so enmeshed in the life of Manhattan’s West Side docks that for a time he even lived with Arthur Brown, the longshoreman who had been instrumental in introducing him to the community. Kazan said of Brown, “He became for Budd, and later for me, the symbol of the longshoremen’s defiant spirit,” and Brown was reportedly the model for the irascible, tough-talking longshoreman Kayo Dugan in the film.

Although Schulberg’s sources and friends were almost entirely located on Manhattan’s West Side, the gangsters who controlled those docks were not about to let anyone shoot a movie critical of them on their own turf. Across the Hudson River, on the other hand, the docks of Hoboken, New Jersey, were controlled by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, whose executive director was sympathetic to the politics of the film, and so, On the Waterfront was made in Hoboken.

While unmistakably a Kazan film, On the Waterfront is also very much a collaboration between two powerful artists—Kazan and Schulberg—and the creative tension between them is evident throughout the film. For the director, the main character was Malloy, but for the screenwriter, it was Father Barry. Schulberg later even went so far as to write a novel that corrected what he considered the film’s misdirected focus.

The famous glove scene—the first real conversation between Brando’s and Saint’s characters—appears to take place in a park in front of a church. The scene was actually shot in three parks, in front of two churches in Hoboken.

On the Waterfront was not Kazan’s first waterfront crime project. In 1951, he and the playwright Arthur Miller had had a finished script and a final budget from Columbia Pictures (or so they thought). Called The Hook, the film was to be about the more Italian-American-dominated docks of Red Hook, Brooklyn. Although accounts differ, it would appear that concerns about Miller’s politics sank the project, and he pulled out.

Many consider On the Waterfront to be a response from Kazan to those who criticized his 1952 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. While this may or may not be true, what is certainly true is that testimony before a committee did not become part of the script until the last of several drafts, and not before actual longshoremen had testified before the actual Waterfront Crime Commission.

Issa Clubb is a producer at the Criterion Collection.