Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront … is a significant, almost a definitive, example of a type of film which traditionally finds Hollywood at its most expert: the melodrama with a stiffening of serious ideas, the journalistic exposé of crime and corruption. Its subject harks back to the racket-smashing thrillers of the 'thirties; its style—location shooting, conscientious concern with surface realism—belongs to the present decade; its pretensions, the attempt to build authentic drama out of an investigation of waterfront gangsterism, are characteristic not only of the director but of a whole school of Hollywood thought….

Budd Schulberg has written a script which is vigorous, credible, at times (in the scenes between Terry and the girl) authentically touching, and which, though it has its over-conventional elements in the characterisation of Friendly and of the priest, never falls into the familiar, specious habit of "dignifying" its working class characters by...