A City Full of Hawks: ‘On the Waterfront’ Seventy Years Later—Still the Great American Contender

Journalist Rebello (Dolls! Dolls! Dolls!) delivers a meticulous account of On the Waterfront’s bumpy path to the silver screen. He discusses how in the early 1950s, director Elia Kazan and playwright Arthur Miller, both fresh off the success of Death of a Salesman, teamed up again to adapt for film a series of New York Sun articles about organized crime’s infiltration of the International Longshoremen’s Association. Politics complicated the fledgling project, Rebello writes, noting that studio bosses unsuccessfully pressed Miller to make the villains Communists instead of racketeers, and that Kazan’s decision to name suspected Communists in his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 drove a wedge between him and Miller. (Novelist Budd Schulberg wrote the final script after Miller’s departure.) Elsewhere, Rebello discusses how producer Sam Spiegel convinced Marlon Brando to sign on to the film despite reservations over Kazan’s testimony, how Spiegel’s “penny-pinching” hampered production (venetian blinds were installed in the taxi for the “I coulda been a contender” scene because Spiegel claimed to have forgotten to pay for rear projection footage), and how the strength of Brando’s performance persuaded Leonard Bernstein to write the score for the film despite his aversion to the film industry. Rebello gamely traces how real-life political drama combined with rank Hollywood gamesmanship to create a classic of American film. Cinephiles will be transfixed. Photos. (Nov.)