Rereleased for its 70th anniversary, Elia Kazan’s classic exploration of corruption and whether or not to squeal is made all the more viscerally powerful by his own Huac testimony
‘The Romans found out what a handful could do, if it’s the right handful,” says Karl Malden’s priest Father Pete Barry to the crowd of sullen, nervous New Jersey longshoremen he’s persuaded to come to his church, like the early Christians hiding in caves; they are wondering whether to stand up to the crooked union mob boss Johnny Friendly, played by Lee J Cobb. Meanwhile, ex-boxer Terry Malloy, played by Marlon Brando, sits at the back of the church, smirking and eavesdropping; midway between Judas and Jesus, he is the washed-up fighter who gets cushy dockworker jobs from Johnny in return for shameful dirty work, his stevedore’s hook hitched over his shoulder. It’s same kind of hook that Johnny will use to crucify his consigliere, Terry’s brother Charley, in a back alley; Charley, who betrayed poor Terry at a vital moment in his boxing career, just as he was going to be a contender.
Elia Kazan’s viscerally powerful tragedy from 1954 is now rereleased for its 70th anniversary; it was written for the screen by Budd Schulberg, inspired by Malcolm Johnson’s Pulitzer-winning journalism about postwar US dockyard corruption, and with a clamorous, brass-heavy musical score by Leonard Bernstein. Its raw passion and wounded masculinity rain down punches on its audience, creating a myth revived and recreated 26 years later in a series of visual and verbal echoes by Martin Scorsese in Raging Bull.
