On the Waterfront (1954): Christ is in the Shape-Up Speech, Written by Budd Schulberg, and Delivered by Karl Malden as Father Barry

By Nicholas Stix

When I was 16 years old, I counted On the Waterfront as the fourth greatest picture ever made, after Mr. Roberts (1955), High Noon (1952), and From Here to Eternity (1953).

Since then it’s slipped some, but not a heck of a lot, and that’s because of the miscasting of Rod Steiger as the bum’s brother. How can an Irishman named Charlie Malloy speak with a German accent?!

For ages, I just assumed that Steiger was Jewish, because he sounded similar to the old Jews in my building, and he played a number of Jews. It wasn’t until years later, after I’d learned German that I realized that Steiger was speaking not with a Yiddish, but rather with a German accent. Sure enough, he’d grown up in a German-speaking household with immigrant parents. And he clearly didn’t bother sitting down with a dialect coach.

However, the rest of the picture holds up. (A momentary exception: Lenny Bernstein’s otherwise magnificent score gets overbearing during the scene in which Father Barry tells Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint) the truth about former pug Terry Malloy (the bum) setting up her bother Joey to get rubbed out.) Lee J. Cobb is brilliant as dock union leader/mob boss, “Johnny Friendly.” (By the way, Cobb’s performance was a do-over of his performance as a crooked produce seller in the badly written Thieves’ Highway (1949).)

On the Waterfront was made from an original screenplay by Budd Schulberg, but it wasn’t really a work of fiction. It was fictionalized journalism. Father Barry was based on a real priest. Kayo Dugan (Paul Henning) was based on a real dockworker (except, thank God, the real Kayo didn’t get ko’ed).

Budd Schulberg was really a crusading journalist disguised as a novelist and screenwriter.

On the Waterfront was also the greatest anti-Communist picture ever made. Its director, Elia Kazan, who was, with Hitchcock, Ford, Wilder, Kurosawa, Lean and Zinnemann, one of the world’s hottest directors in the 1950s, had been a Communist Party member, and “named names,” in order not to be blacklisted. He had made an anti-Communist classic the previous year, Man on a Tightrope, with Fredric March heading a sterling ensemble cast (Adolph Menjou, Gloria Graham, Paul Henning, Richard Boone, et al.), and working from a script by none other than Robert E. Sherwood (The Best Years of Our Lives, and the plays The Petrified Forest and Abe Lincoln in Illinois, etc.).

Giants, giants!

So, Johnny Friendly stood in for The Party.

Prior to Waterfront, I believe that Dana Andrews’ performance as returning bombardier captain Fred Derry in Best Years was the greatest supporting performance ever given in a picture, but even Andrews’ work was surpassed by Karl Malden’s work as Father Barry. Here he is, saying an impromptu eulogy over the dead body of Kayo Dugan, who had just been assassinated on Johnny Friendly’s say-so, when one of his henchmen dropped a load of cases of Irish Whiskey on Dugan’s head, to stop him from testifying before the Crime Commission.

On the Waterfront (1954): The Crucifixion Speech