Fleapit revisited:On The Waterfront.

"She looks like Eve Marie saint in On The Waterfront" - Rattlesnakes, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions

"Johnny Friendly ain't a man to love, Johnny Friendly ain't a man to love" - Johnny Friendly, JoBoxers

With at least two eighties classics (ok, minor classics) referencing Elia Kazan's 1954 film On The Waterfront (written by Budd Schulberg, with a score by Leonard Bernstein, and available - now - on BBC2 and the iPlayer) you'd have thought I'd have got round to watching it before today. It may have come out fourteen years before I was born but I've had five and a half decades to catch up and it is quite a well known, and well respected, film.

It's a good one too. Interesting, well acted, and engrossing. Though I was never all that emotionally engaged with the characters. Could it be that the film has dated? Could it be because I watched it on television instead of at the cinema? Who know?. It didn't affect my enjoyment of it but, perhaps, if I'd really cared about at least one of the key protagonists then I'm sure I'd have liked it even more.

Chief among those protagonists is Marlon Brando's Terry Malloy. Terry's an ex-boxer working as a longshoreman at Hoboken docks in New Jersey. His career in pugilism had been going well until he'd thrown a fight he could easily have won on the orders of mob boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) whose right hand man, Charley the Gent (Rod Steiger), is Terry's more well educated brother.

Terry is persuaded to entice fellow dock worker Joey Doyle (Ben Wagner) on to a rooftop so that Friendly's goons can have a word or two with him. Terry thinks they're going to put pressure on him to stop him testifying to the Waterfront Crime Commission against Friendly. But, instead, they have more lethal plans. They push him off the roof. To his death.

This upsets Terry but Johnny Friendly is not a man who lives up to his name (a name he has even given to a local bar) so there's not much he can do about it. Or is there? The stevedores who want to stay alive, and retain some kind of employment, operate a "don't ask no questions/don't answer no questions" policy but Edie Doyle (Eve Marie Saint in her film debut), Joey's sister, wants answers to the questions that everyone seems afraid, or unwilling, to ask.

Father Pete Barry (Karl Malden), an Irish priest who refers to himself as "a potato eater" (cheese eaters will also feature later in the film), offers to help Edie get justice and calls a meeting of longshoremen which Terry turns up to in the role as Friendly's snitch. The other dockers, knowing who Terry's brother is, see through this immediately. They don't trust Terry. So now he's getting it from both sides.

But when Friendly's men violently break up the meeting, Terry helps Edie escape and then - inevitably and predictably - he starts to fall for her. She is quite beautiful. She's in training to be a nun, or an RE teacher, or something supposedly wholesome like that, but because Terry is played by Marlon Brando, she, of course, starts falling for him too.

Edie is idealistic, sees the best in people, and she's never even tasted beer. She's innocent to the point of naivete so she's a direct opposite of Terry who is hard bitten, uncouth, and believes that every man is out for himself and himself only. He can't believe that Father Barry isn't operating some kind of racket because in his world everyone is operating some kind of racket.

It's a world of fat cigars, whisky, horse racing, pool halls, camel hair coats, wads of cash, machismo, and smart guys. Smart in dress and smart in banter. It's also a world of pigeons and we soon see that the longshoremen like Terry and his colleague Kayo Dugan (Pat Henning) are the pigeons and the mobsters are like the hawks who swoop down from New York's tall buildings to take what they haven't earned. Be it pigeons or men.

Terry sees himself as a "bum" who's ended up with a "one way ticket to Palookaville" and, at one point, he even mutters the immortal lines "I coulda been a contender, I coulda been somebody". Yes, this is the film that line comes from. Not only that it boasts cameos from both Fred Gwynne (later to find fame as Herman Munster) and The High Chaparral's Leif Erickson.

Good stuff. More importantly though, we must find out if the romance between Terry and Edie works out, if Edie and Father Barry succeed in getting justice for Joey, and if Terry will ever do the right thing (and, if so, what will that cost him)?

To get there there will be unfortunate 'accidents', punch-ups, talks of crucifixion, subpoenas, and a whole steamy dock's worth of foghorns. People will die - in unpleasant circumstances. Will their deaths be in vain or will good triumph over bad. The film was made in 1954. You have a guess.