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ON THE WATERFRONT
Overview: Context, Structure, Style, Symbolism
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Background
• Produced at the time of America’s “red scare” of the
1950’s
• Set on New York’s Docklands
• Longshoreman – dock worker who loaded / unloaded ships’
cargoes.
• Documentary style approach
• Black-and-white photography gives a stark presentation of
the dirty tenements and the treacherous docks
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• The film is based on a series of Pulitzer Prize–winning
news articles by Malcolm Johnson, published in the New
York Sun in 1949.
• The articles exposed the murder, extortion and stand-over
tactics infesting the docks, which were controlled by the
corrupt Longshoremen’s Union.
• A Congressional inquiry, like the one in the film, was set
up to hear evidence from the dockworkers in an attempt
to clean up the waterfront.
• The movie reflects an aspect of American life at that time.
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CONTEXT
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Elia Kazan, the film’s director
• had his own reasons for wanting to tell the story of a
courageous whistleblower who risks life and reputation to
follow his conscience and give testimony.
• Kazan, a Communist Party member in his youth, had
testified in 1952 to the HUAC (House Un-American
Activities Commission) against his peers in the film
industry and had been subjected to much contempt and
rejection.
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• HUAC subpoenaed many actors, screenwriters, and
directors to coerce them into informing on their colleagues
making public which of their friends now had, or formerly
had, any associations with the Communist Party.
• HUAC subpoenaed Kazan once, and at his initial hearing
he refused to divulge details.
• At a second hearing in 1952, however, Kazan chose to
give the names of seven former colleagues from his
Group Theatre days.
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• The choice Terry makes to inform on the union officials
echoes the choice Elia Kazan made to inform before
HUAC on former communists, but Terry achieves results
that are far less morally ambiguous than the results
Kazan achieved.
• Kazan effectively blacklisted for decades many of his
creative, intelligent, and politically active peers. The only
loser from Terry’s decision is Johnny Friendly, a merciless
bully who clearly deserves what he gets.
Kazan’s life time achievement award video
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Kazan’s testimony allowed him to pursue
a directing career undisturbed.
• However, many of his subsequent films deal with themes
similar to those in On the Waterfront.
• The recurring themes also suggest that Kazan felt a need
to continually assert the right of the individual’s
conscience over that of a mob or governmental authority.
• At the end of On the Waterfront, Terry is surrounded with
people who admire and respect him. His informing has
elevated him in the longshoremen’s eyes, and he has no
reason to doubt his decision.
• Kazan, though he built a successful career, was never
fully embraced by Hollywood, and his own decision to
inform stranded him in morally ambiguous territory.
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• Kazan’s justifications, however, met with much criticism,
particularly from his good friend Arthur Miller, who
believed naming names was a betrayal of fellow artists.
• On the Waterfront celebrates as a hero a man who
informed on mob leaders, and many people believe that
Kazan made the film as a response to Miller, and other
critics.
• Miller’s play The Crucible, whose hero dies rather than
accuse people of being witches, of course represents the
opposing view.
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Elia Kazan - Director
• Movie
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STRUCTURE AND STYLE
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Structure and style
• Kazan wanted his directing in On the Waterfront
to be invisible so that the actors’ performances
could be the focus of the film.
• Conveys the sense of a community:
• exhausted, paralysed and rendered fearful by
corrupting forces within its midst that have
wrested democracy from the grasp of the
common people. “It ain’t part of America”.
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Cinematography: black-and-white film.
 Shadowy tenement buildings and laneways seem to
close in around the characters, who are trapped in
their narrow lives, and
 the sharp vertical lines of cranes and staircases hint
at the dangers that await them. Contrasting with this
darkness is the expansive rooftop, open to the sky,
Terry’s place of refuge.
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Two entwined narratives.
1. The love story: Edie goes down to the docks to find out about
Joey’s death
2. Terry’s redemption begins when he is first attracted to the
beautiful, angry girl.
• How are they entwined:
• It takes Edie’s moral strength to draw Terry away from his
allegiance to corruption and it takes the sexual attraction
between them to draw Edie out of her convent-bred
conservatism.
• The two main characters are: the flawed young man and the
angelic young woman who helps him overcome his doubts and
failings to become a hero.
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The actors’ faces and gestures
help the viewer to understand the character.
 Terry’s stretching of the woollen glove onto his
workman’s hand as he walks with Edie in the park
teases her but shows his fascination with her;
 Terry’s gentle turning aside of the gun Charley pulls
on him in the taxi says everything that is needed
about the love between the brothers
 the confusion and misery on Terry’s face as he talks
to Edie in the pub reveal the internal struggle of this
inarticulate character.
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Kazan makes use of symbolism
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Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colours used to represent abstract ideas or concepts
Clothes symbolise their wearers.
a. The windbreaker that is passed from Joey to KO to Terry
connects its wearer to the struggle for justice.
b. The fine, warm overcoats of the Union bosses show their
swaggering prosperity,
c. while the workers’ poverty is apparent as they shiver in
shabby jackets.
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Kazan makes use of symbolism
The prize fight that Terry has lost, and that still rankles him,
foreshadows his taking on the Union, with even higher stakes and a
second chance to ‘be somebody’.
Empire state building . Across the Hudson, the Empire State
Building looms like the Emerald City from the Wizard of Oz,
distant and strange. It represents dreams and a different life, yet
it’s always glimpsed through a fog. Its sleek jutting frame
contrasts dramatically with the ramshackle rooftops of Hoboken,
with their discolored patches and mismatched roof levels.
The Hudson River - separates Hoboken, New Jersey, from New
York City. Manhattan may as well be a thousand miles away,
since the Manhattan life the longshoremen imagine is so
different from daily life on the waterfront. The river is a border, an
edge that the longshoremen will never be able to cross.
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Symbolism: Pigeons
• The pigeons are cooped up in a cage. They’re fragile. Their
natural impulse is to fly, but they’ve been trained not to. They
perfectly symbolize Terry Malloy.
• Though he’s a tough former boxer, his excessive care for these
birds indicates a special affinity between them. The imagery of
him actually inside the cage himself, evident when he tends the
birds, suggests this affinity as well. Malloy is a dreamer, a
delicate and sensitive man, and much of the conversation that
he has with Edie about hawks and pigeons can be translated
into words about each other. In many ways, Malloy essentially
is a pigeon—that is, he lives on the rooftops. We never once
see him in his apartment. His home is the roof.
• The pigeons also have a negative connotation: stool pigeon, a
slang term used to describe informers. A pigeon is a sucker.
Every time a character uses the term stool pigeon or its
abbreviation, stoolie, Terry Malloy’s conflict boils to the surface.
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Symbolism: Hooks
• The sharp metallic hooks that the longshoremen use to
help them load and empty pallets hang over their
shoulders menacingly.
• These hooks represent the forces that literally hang over
them in the form of Johnny Friendly’s goons. Over the
course of the film, Terry, Dugan, Luke, and many other
longshoremen have the hawk-like talon of the hook
pressing against their chests.