Marlon Brando stars in ON THE WATERFRONT

In Elia Kazan’s crime-drama classic ON THE WATERFRONT (1954) legendary actor Marlon Brando gave one of the seminal performances of his career as Terry Malloy a boxer who could’ve been a champion but turned into just another palooka because he got paid to take falls for the short end money. We get to know Terry in the midst of a tough personal dilemna when the police begin trying to bust up the underworld influence on the longshoreman’s union which he happens to be a part of. A ruthless mob boss named Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) controls the waterfront and the workers along with Charley (Rod Steiger) Terry’s older brother which makes his troubles even more dire. Terry also falls in love with a local girl (Eva Marie Saint) but their relationship becomes strained in the midst of the turmoil surrounding his problems with the mob. The depiction of the working class people has been noted by Director Martin Scorsese as being extremely authentic and based in a reality he knew. It remains both an emotionally powerful urban tale and a cinematic time capsule of what life was like in that rough and tumble world.

For classic cinema fans this upcoming release from Criterion Collection is a must own. It will be on sale February 19th.

Special Features:

* New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
* Alternate presentations of the restoration in two additional aspect ratios: 1.85:1 (widescreen) and 1.33:1 (full-screen)
* Alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS-HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray edition
* Commentary featuring authors Richard Schickel and Jeff Young
* Conversation between filmmaker Martin Scorsese and critic Kent Jones
* Elia Kazan: Outsider (1982), an hour-long documentary
* New documentary on the making of the film, featuring interviews with scholar Leo Braudy, critic David Thomson, and others
* New interview with actress Eva Marie Saint
* Interview with director Elia Kazan from 2001
* Contender, a 2001 documentary on the film’s most famous scene
* New interview with longshoreman Thomas Hanley, an actor in the film
* New interview with author James T. Fisher (On the Irish Waterfront) about the real-life people and places behind the film
* Visual essay on Leonard Bernstein’s score
* Visual essay on the aspect ratio
* Trailer
* PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Michael Almereyda and reprints of Kazan’s 1952 ad in the New York Times defending his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, one of the 1948 New York Sun articles by Malcolm Johnson on which the film was based, and a 1953 Commonweal piece by screenwriter Budd Schulberg.

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