The scene, however, isn’t ultimately about whether or not Terry will testify, but rather about the fraught relationship between the two brothers. With great, almost childlike sadness, Terry utters the immortal lines, “I coulda had a class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody instead of a bum, which is what I am.” In a fit of emotional nakedness, Terry lays his lost dreams at his brother’s feet, reminding him that his boxing career was derailed when he took a dive in an important bout so that the waterfront boss, Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), could make money gambling against him. “You saw some money,” Charley retorts, reminding Terry that he benefitted financially from the dive, as well, but the words ring hollow—to both of the men in the cab and to us. In that moment, and in Brando’s puffy, anguished eyes, we see a man who poignantly and tragically realizes that his life ended before it ever had a chance to begin and suddenly understands why. “You was my brother, Charley, you shoulda looked out for me a little bit,” Terry tells him, and it strikes us not as whining, but as pleading (the “little bit” in the dialogue is essential, in this regard). It’s a desperate man’s desperate desire to understand why his life has turned out the way it has, why he never got “his night” and therefore wound up in “palookaville.” In short, why he isn’t somebody. It is the most poignant scene in a film that is filled with them, testament to both Kazan’s abiding humanism and Brando and Steiger’s performative brilliance.

On the Waterfront, which was produced independently outside of the Hollywood studio system and revived Kazan’s career after his tumultuous decision to “name names” before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, was a watershed moment in cinema history, and it remains one of the greatest films of the 1950s. It was a time when American filmmakers were beginning to absorb the realist aesthetic that had been cutting through European cinema in the postwar years and use it to depict tough subject matter in an increasingly frank manner. Kazan, who had first made his mark with so-called “social problem films” in the late 1940s, including the Oscar-winning Gentlemen’s Agreement (1947), which dealt with anti-Semitism, and Pinky (1949), which dealt with “passing” and interracial romance, was particularly well suited to this terrain. As a founding member of the Actors Studio in New York, which used the “Method” developed by Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theater, Kazan had a gift for working with actors. While he split his time between cinema and the stage, where he directed the Broadway premiers of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, there was a seamlessness in the way his work relied on the power of his performers. It is no surprise, then, that he was drawn to Brando, who he directed on stage in Streetcar when he was only 23 and in whom he recognized a true genius. Kazan gave Brando—who he described as the only actor genius he had ever encountered—all the credit for his powerful work in On the Waterfront. Working with him was, in Kazan’s words, “like directing some genius animal.”

Brando’s Terry is a sad sack of a character surrounded by others who embody the kind of intensity and vibrancy that he lost years ago. This is particularly true of Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint), the feisty and determined sister of the man Terry helped lure to his death. Terry is immediately attracted to Edie and she to him; they recognize some sense of shared innocence in each other, even though their relationship is tragically overshadowed by Terry withholding the very knowledge that she seeks. He wants to be with her and share in her vitality, but he has to hold back because the one thing he cannot do to help her is come clean regarding his own culpability. This tension also extends to his relationship with Father Barry (Karl Malden), the local parish priest who is determined to help the exploited longshoremen get their fair share even though it means going up against the powerful union that takes advantage of them. Shining a light on the union’s tactics is crucial to undermining their control of the docks, and again Terry finds himself torn about whether to come clean or keep his mouth shut. If he speaks the truth, he will lose what little he has left; but, if he continues to withhold what he knows, he risks the potentially darker and more disturbing fate of remaining tormented by his own silence.

Of course, one cannot watch On the Waterfront without taking into account the film’s political context. Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg (who also penned Kazan’s bitter media satire A Face in the Crowd three years later), both of whom had joined and then become disillusioned with the Communist Party in the 1930s, had “named names” during the HUAC investigation into the supposed communist infiltration of the movie industry. To many of his contemporaries, Kazan was a traitor, and his association with the McCarthy era and the damage done to many men’s careers as a result of his testimony stuck with him for decades, to the point that when he was given an honorary achievement Oscar in 1999, there were people in the audience who refused to applaud when he walked on stage flanked by fervent admirers Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro.

Thus, there is a tendency to see On the Waterfront as a self-serving parable about the moral responsibility of coming clean; one could see it as Kazan and Schulberg’s silver-screen justification of their own political culpability. Yet, to see the film in only this light is to miss its greater moments and timeless qualities. Shot in gritty black-and-white by Boris Kaufman (L’Atlante, 12 Angry Men) on location in the wintry chill of Hoboken, New Jersey, On the Waterfront is first and foremost a powerful evocation of time and place, bearing with it the kind of rough verisimilitude that often escaped studio-bound Hollywood films. The brilliance of the performances by Brando, Steiger, Malden, and Saint are inextricably linked to the film’s physicality and sense of location; they feel like characters who just stepped off a dock or out of the darkness of a saloon, rather than actors playing their roles. The film’s indelible and permanent political subtext remains, but is overshadowed by the larger humanist concerns, which rightly recognize the thin line between right and wrong and that the ability to choose is what makes us human, even as the consequences of those choices might threaten that very humanity. While some may see Terry as Kazan’s on-screen surrogate Christ figure, taking a beating and still standing up for what he sees as right, he is ultimately a tragic figure of lost opportunity grabbing for the last bit of good he might be able to accomplish in a brutal world—his poignant last chance to be somebody.

Copyright ©2013 James Kendrick

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All images copyright © Columbia Pictures and The Criterion Collection