Quay text: "On the Waterfront"

Even without the 70th anniversary of the film and the centenary of its star, there would be reasons enough to revisit 1954's On the Waterfront. A major, socially engaged Hollywood work of its moment, it remains an Best Picture winner most would agree deserved its glory, an example of post-War studio filmmaking that internalised at least one of the lessons of European neo-realism in seeking out and shooting on actual locations, and a foundational text in the cult of Marlon Brando. In 2024, Waterfront also seems to enter into semi-enlightening conversation with the current chattering-class concern of so-called cancel culture. Brando begins the film in a cinematically familiar position outside a window, establishing his fallen boxing hero Terry Malloy as both an outsider and a man of the streets, even as the character lures a man to his death with the aid of a pigeon - an act Malloy spends the rest of the movie regretting. In this, Waterfront is inextricably linked to the biography of its conflicted director Elia Kazan; it's one of those films where it may be tougher than most to separate the art from the artist. The slight fudge the movie arrives at is to indicate it was the corruption inherent in society that made Terry Malloy do what he did: that in a world ruled by mob bosses and corrupt union leaders, there is only so much a priest like Karl Malden or the love of a good Eva Marie Saint can do for a guy, and only so much a guy can do without getting tainted or selling someone else down the river. Feel free to agree or disagree, or to dismiss that as self-justifying hooey - the film has provoked lively debate for seven decades now, and Kazan remained a controversial figure at least as late as 1999, when his honorary Oscar split the Academy crowd.

What's unarguable is that this is a great piece of writing by Budd Schulberg, practically a Casablanca of the New Jersey docks: a hero yanked from morose self-isolation, surrounded by salty pockets of life, deeper and wetter than they were in North Africa, the conviviality replaced by deadly self-interest. (The real cancellation, Schulberg reminds us, is being snuffed out.) Malden's Father Pete is easily the most compelling movie priest of the whole 1950s, surpassing both Monty Clift in I Confess and Claude Laydu in the Bresson film; one mitigating factor against hooey is that there is more life around Terry Malloy than there is left in Terry Malloy himself. Kazan builds a world without seeming to lift a finger, in large part because Schulberg did the heavier lifting at the typewriter - but it was the director who hauled this story off the backlots and out onto the streets, the most rewarding choice of all here. You hear the traffic passing whenever Leonard Bernstein's strenuous score recedes; we only ever seem three feet away from the nearest rat (or stool pigeon). A little of its grubbiness found its way into the New Hollywood of the 1970s - Sidney Lumet was surely among the movie's keenest students - but by then the movies had all but turned their back on Kazan; instead, the film seems to have been a bigger influence on turn-of-the-millennium television. (The pigeons came home to roost on NYPD Blue; the idea of docks as a permeable membrane, vulnerable to rot, was taken up by cable TV's The Wire.) As for Brando, his most radical contributions to the art of screen acting - the mumbling, the constant gum-chewing, the avoidance of eye contact - continues to strike me as mannerism; what must at the time have been thrilling to watch now looks like trouble up ahead. (Crucially, he never appears as credibly tough as this script intends Terry Malloy to be; set him against, say, the heavy operating the bar he storms into come the final reel, and he really is just an actor throwing poses, the first stevedore to have discovered contouring.) Yet there was a reason every hack impressionist for the next forty years had a Terry Malloy up their sleeve: at some point, the movies had lines that stuck with us, because of the vast depths of feeling the actors found hiding behind their words.

On the Waterfront returns to selected cinemas from today.