After loving Brando's incandescent performance in "A Streetcar Named Desire", and conditioned by the hagiographic treatment it gets in film history, I was psyched to see "On the Waterfront". What a disappointment. Karl Malden's "acting" is wooden and banal. Brando seems constrained (almost bemused at times) and halfhearted at best. The Bernstein score is an annoying and distracting retread of "West Side Story". The screenplay is full of stilted dialog, with a plot (apparently developed with the creative consultation of J. Edgar Hoover) that was hackneyed 15 years before the film was made. The supporting characters are stereotypes from gangster movies from the thirties and forties. A prime example of a movie perhaps somewhat blindly worshiped.
Review of On the Waterfront
