Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8154 in DVD
• Released on: 2009-01-26
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Format: PAL
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 103 minutes

Synopsis
Elia Kazan's compelling social drama was the winner of eight Academy Awards and marks one of Marlon Brando's finest screen performances. Brando is Terry Malloy, a handsome but inarticulate longshoreman, who gets involved in a labor scandal when a fellow dock worker is murdered. He knows that the victim was killed by the oppressive labor union for squealing to a commission investigating misdoings. Terry intends to keep his mouth shut and his job safe. But when Edie (Eva Marie-Saint), the dead man's beautiful sister, comes to town, he must choose between his allegiance to a corrupt union and his loyalty to Edie.

Customer Reviews

The Sopranos 1950s style
This film must be have been an inspiration for Martin Scorsese's mob films and David Chase's Sopranos: similar characters, similar scenarios and it evokes that New-York-feel which is so compelling. You can see the Empire State Building in the background in one or two shots.

This is a gruesome and tough story about the longshoremen and the corrupt working practices that went on there. Marlon Brando is superb. It's an oldie, but a very goodie.

FILM BASED ON LABOUR HISTORY
[[ASIN:B001MAA6QK On The Waterfront [DVD]
On the Waterfront was Marlon Brando's sixth film and the first to win an Academy Award for him. If today the performance seems less convincing and more mannered than it did at the time of the film's first release, it must be remembered that On the Waterfront was the peak of Brando's meteoric early film career. Terry Malloy was an amalgam of Stanley Kowalski from A Streetcar named Desire (1951) Emiliano Zapata from Viva Zapata! (1952) and Johnny from The Wild One (1953). It may not be too fanciful to see in On the Waterfront, a thinly veiled allegory of Kazan's new - found anti - communism. The dockers become the Hollywood community, the gangs become the Communist Party and Terry Malloy, the hero, is Kazan himself. Yet there is no irony in the handling of the plot. Either way, the parallel offers another argument against On the Waterfront's much vaunted realism. Budd Schulberg, the writer, may have fashioned his story out of news - feature material provided by the journalist Malcolm Johnson but, when On the Waterfront was released, he and Kazan had chipped away at this material until a fairy story emerged. Real racketeering and the struggle against it were never like this. Political realities were not allowed to undermine the simplistic moral struggle between good and evil. The film is laden with straightforward Christian symbolism and carries the metaphor of Terry's caged pigeons with some signs of weariness. The one genuine originality of On the Waterfront remains in its choice of setting and Boris Kaufman's evocative cinematography - otherwise it might just as easily be a clichéd Western (complete with civilized schoolma'am in the shape of Eva Marie Saint) or, for that matter a crass apologia for Kazan's actions in the face of McCarthyite witch - hunt.

You need to be in the moment: you need to watch the body working
Some complain about pace I see and they must be young (we can forgive that) or just very boring themselves...109 minutes! How long have you been playing that video game? That's about three and a bit episodes of Eastenders. Well, never mind. You cannot, however, imagine anyone watching this with anywhere near the same level of interest if it was James Dean or John Garfield or anyone else unless perhaps de Niro. You watch it for how to act as well as someone in Italian neo-realism and then the flourishes of genius. Perhaps he comes closest to this in acting himself in the short 'Meet Marlon Brando' - an hilarious 20 minutes of charisma on display.