On the Waterfront

A prizefighter-turned-longshoreman with a conscience goes up against labor leaders to expose corruption, extortion, and murder among the union ranks.

A near-unanimous critical triumph on release and ever since, the film is most celebrated for Brando's transformation of Terry Malloy into a genuinely complicated figure from the American working-class underworld — a performance widely credited with reshaping what screen acting could be. The one persistent fault line runs not through the filmmaking but through its politics: Kazan's own history of naming names to HUAC has led some to read the film's celebration of the informant as self-justifying propaganda rather than moral courage.