IMDb #121 Review: On the Waterfront (1954)

Source: Wikipedia

At the docks, the mobs control who works and who starves, who gets paid off and what cash mysteriously disappears, what stuff gets shipped out and what goods remain suspiciously undeclared. Most importantly, they decide who meets unfortunate accidents for even thinking about breaking the code of silence.

Despite the name, stool pigeons don't fly very well. More stool than pigeon, when dropped off a building they go splat in the street.

Who's gonna care about a dead squealer? Not his friends, not his boss, not even his landlady. No, leave it to his angry little sister. Short on know-how but big on why-I'm-going-to, she vows justice.

She conscripts the help of a Catholic priest, who leaves his cloister to visit the flock at work. This is the type of guy who administers last rites to a guy who just suffered a not-so-mysterious accident right in front of him.

The priest calls special meetings in the church basement. Not for any suspicious reasons, but to implore the longshoremen to consider telling the truth instead of saving their own skins.

Our ostensible hero, Marlon Brando, starts out attending the meetings as a snitch. (See, guys, it's OK when we do it.) Then his dead buddy's sister gets under his skin, the skin he worked so hard to save.

"Johnny Friendly," the mob boss who's anything but, tightens his grip. He tosses the tosser into a crap job in the ship's hold. He tells the hero to lose the girl; the hero tells him to get lost. Which doesn't go over too well.

Then the crucial trial comes up, and what do you think happens. The good guy does the right thing and suffers for it. He's blackballed. His buddy's prize pigeons get their necks wrung -- more than mildly symbolic. Work dries up, as do his friendships. I won't say what pushes him over the edge, only that it leaves him no excuse not to fight back.

The ex-fighter gets back up. He's not D&D, deaf and dumb, like the other guys. He won't throw the second-most important fight of his life. And for all the time it takes to reach the peak, his "fight the power" moment is immensely satisfying.

I guess solidarity can be a bad thing. People are tough to change. Lots of people working together for the wrong reason are tougher. And any brave idiot willing to do the inglorious snitching for a good cause deserves a black-eyed patron saint in Marlon Brando.

108 minutes.