On The Waterfront Movie Quotes

Hey, I got an idea, let’s go to the movies. I wanna go to the movies, I want to take you all to the movies. Let’s go and experience the art of the cinema. Let’s begin with the Scream Of Fear, and we are going to haunt us for the rest of our lives. And then let’s go see The Great Escape, and spend our summer jumping our bikes, just like Steve McQueen over barb wire. And then let’s catch The Seven Samurai for some reason on PBS, and we’ll feel like we speak Japanese because we can read the subtitles and hear the language at the same time. And then let’s lose sleep the night before we see 2001: A Space Odyssey because we have this idea that it’s going to change forever the way we look at films. And then let’s go see it four times in one year. And let’s see Woodstock three times in one year and let’s see Taxi Driver twice in one week. And let’s see Close Encounters of the Third Kind just so we can freeze there in mid-popcorn. And when the kids are old enough, let’s sit them together on the sofa and screen City Lights and Stage Coach and The Best Years of Our Lives and On The Waterfront and Midnight Cowboy and Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show and Raging Bull and Schindler’s List… so that they can understand how the human condition can be captured by this amalgam of light and sound and literature we call the cinema.

Sometime in the fifties I remember seeing On the Waterfront in the movies with Mary and thinking that I’m at least as bad as that Marlon Brando character and that some day I’d like to get in union work. The Teamsters gave me good job security at Food Fair. They could only fire you if they caught you stealing. Let me put it another way, they could only fire you if they caught you stealing and they could prove it.

Sometime in the fifties I remember seeing On the Waterfront in the movies with Mary and thinking that I’m at least as bad as that Marlon Brando character and that some day I’d like to get in union work. The Teamsters gave me good job security at Food Fair. They could only fire you if they caught you stealing. Let me put it another way, they could only fire you if they caught you stealing and they could prove it. • chapter eight • Russell Bufalino In 1957 the mob came out of the closet. It came out unwillingly, but out it came. Before 1957 reasonable men could differ over whether an organized network of gangsters existed in America. For years FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had assured America that no such organization existed, and he deployed the FBI’s greatest resources to investigate suspected Communists. But as a result of the publicity foisted on the mob in 1957, even Hoover came on board. The organization was dubbed “La Cosa Nostra,” meaning “this thing of ours,” a term heard on government wiretaps. Ironically,

So the more manly you are, the less you say?” “Right.” Simon nodded. Past him she could see the humid fog lowering over the East River, shrouding the waterfront in feathery gray mist. The water itself was the color of lead, churned to a whipped cream consistency by the steady wind. “That’s why when major badasses greet each other in movies, they don’t say anything, they just nod. The nod means, ‘I am a badass, and I recognize that you, too, are a badass,’ but they don’t say anything because they’re Wolverine and Magneto and it would mess up their vibe to explain.” “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Jace, from the backseat. “Good,” Clary said, and was rewarded by the smallest of smiles from Simon as he turned the van onto the Manhattan Bridge, heading toward Brooklyn and home.

Hey, I got an idea, let’s go to the movies. I wanna go to the movies, I want to take you all to the movies. Let’s go and experience the art of the cinema. Let’s begin with the Scream Of Fear, and we're gonna have it haunt us for the rest of our lives. And then let’s go see The Great Escape, and spend our summer jumping our bikes, just like Steve McQueen over barb wire. And then let’s catch The Seven Samurai for some reason on PBS, and we’ll feel like we speak Japanese because we can read the subtitles and hear the language at the same time. And then let’s lose sleep the night before we see 2001: A Space Odyssey because we have this idea that it’s going to change forever the way we look at films. And then let’s go see it four times in one year. And let’s see Woodstock three times in one year and let’s see Taxi Driver twice in one week. And let’s see Close Encounters of the Third Kind just so we can freeze there in mid-popcorn. And when the kids are old enough, let’s sit them together on the sofa and screen City Lights and Stage Coach and The Best Years of Our Lives and On The Waterfront and Midnight Cowboy and Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show and Raging Bull and Schindler’s List… so that they can understand how the human condition can be captured by this amalgam of light and sound and literature we call the cinema.

Robert Kennedy was inspired to take on organized crime by watching the landmark movie On the Waterfront.

In late 1953 Corridan would tell actor Karl Malden, who was visiting Chelsea in preparation for his role as the Corridan-inspired priest in the film On the Waterfront: “I was born in this neighborhood [the West Side]. When I was growing up there were two ways to go. Become a priest or a hood.

Malloy

The ubiquity of alcoholism in Chelsea and neighboring Irish waterfront communities can scarcely be overstated:

He was left to find his way again, working through the anger he felt over his church’s willingness to protect criminal enterprises presided over by prominent communicants and his despondence at the unwillingness

Between Hell’s Kitchen and Greenwich Village lay Chelsea, the heart and soul of the Irish waterfront.

The claim staked on the world’s richest piers by a vast cadre of Irish American longshoremen was akin to a hereditary birthright.

Each year a cadre of recent Jesuit high school graduates—among them Philip Carey of the Regis class of 1925—proceeded directly to a Jesuit novitiate to launch their arduous training for the priesthood.

Church and state knew no separation in the Jersey City of my youth. Together they presided over a strict private morality and a thriving public pilferage.

Together they would shift the focus of Catholic activism in the city from militant anticommunism to a much more perilous internal critique of the Irish waterfront and its powerful code of silence.

Irish longshoremen who worked on the Hudson River piers became the backbone of the Italian Church of St. Anthony of Padua” on nearby West Houston Street.

New York journalist Richard Carter, a Corridan ally, quickly arranged to co-write a tell-all article with DeVincenzo for the May 1953 issue of True, a men’s magazine found in virtually every barbershop in urban America during the 1950s and 1960s.

As a veteran journalist who covered both sides of the waterfront once remarked, had a path been paved across the Hudson, Chelsea and Hoboken would have made one neighborhood.

The lords of the waterfront evinced little or no interest in their ancestral homeland, though their story makes for a meaningful chapter in the saga of the Irish diaspora.

Catholics who dominated both industry and labor on the waterfront counted on priests’ minding their own business when it came to the conduct of their livelihoods.

The three-and-a-half-week walkout “had little effect on Britain’s decision to grant Ireland independence,” wrote Bruce Nelson, but it did lead to the integration—if short-lived—of African Americans into the Chelsea Piers workforce, the experience of diaspora and oppression briefly uniting black and Irish dockworkers “who had long regarded each other with suspicion and even hatred.

Budd Schulberg was a social democrat; his discovery through Pete Corridan of the labor-friendly papal social encyclicals transformed his outlook, as it did that of many others—including Catholics—who were unaware that the church possessed a semi-progressive social teaching.

In the 1890s the reform journalist E. L. Godkin alleged that Tammany leaders feared biography more than the penitentiary.

Jersey City’s railroads were built by Irish immigrants, men from Con-naught and Munster who dug a crucial tunnel through the Palisades in the late 1850s, linking waterfront rail terminals with tracks laid in the meadow-lands to the west and the vast continent that lay beyond.

In 1936 the New York Jesuits opened Xavier Labor School in Chelsea—the West Side’s preeminent waterfront neighborhood—designed to combat the infiltration of local unions by communists, the ultimate outsiders.

Corridan rarely elaborated in detail on his church’s social teachings. His approach was grounded in part in a Catholic understanding of natural law as universally operative and not dependent for its validation on the claims of any particular theological tradition.

While he remained “steadfast in refusing to take part in Catholic services during the next four decades,” Tobin’s “intellectual development showed clear marks of his Jesuit training,” Doig suggests, especially in his intense rationalism, appreciation of debate, and devotion to the classics.

When he was unexpectedly elevated to the executive director’s position in 1942, Tobin quickly instilled at the Port Authority a disciplined, hierarchical, but deeply communitarian ethos designed to serve not power but a higher moral purpose.

By the late nineteenth century the dazzlingly multiethnic character of the now great metropolis echoed the diverse origins of its earliest European explorers, but only one group knew the port as their place. For if the port made New York, the Irish made the port.

1940s Jersey City childhood, “I grew up thinking America was an Italian country governed by the

waterfront gospel of Father John M. Corridan preached with all the courage of his soldierly progenitor, Francis Xavier, goes right to the heart of our waterfront problem.

The spirit of the Catholic Church’s modern social teachings was never rendered so forcefully as in those five minutes of On the Waterfront

Labor reformers, journalists, Irish Americans one generation or a few miles removed from the waterfront, and viewers in the heartland of America adored this movie.

Historian Garry Wills later captured the 1950s liberal Catholic’s affinity for “steel and glass fish-shaped churches, and driftwood-swirl Madonnas, and wrought-iron abstract tracery for the stations of the cross (artily photographed in Jubilee).”31

A “skinny kid from Hoboken” named Frank Sinatra helped bring an end to the Irish waterfront’s golden age.

It was during the early summer of 1952 that I found myself in the small community park next to Stevens Institute of Technology. Although I had a job, I had only worked as a “soda jerk” for a little over a week before I started looking for something else. The Hoboken waterfront was still familiar to me from earlier years when I walked this way to catch the trolley or the electrified Public Service bus home from the Lackawanna Ferry Terminal. Remembering the gray-hulled Liberty Ships being fitted out for the war at these dilapidated piers, was still very much embedded in my memory. Things had not changed all that much, except that the ships that were once here were now at the bottom of the ocean, sold, or nested at one of the “National Defense Reserve Fleets.” The iconic movie On the Waterfront had not yet been filmed, and it would take another two years before Marlon Brando would stand on the same pier I was now looking down upon, from the higher level of Stevens Park. Labor problems were common during this era, but it was all new to me. I was only 17 years old, but would later remember how Marlon Brando got the stuffing kicked out of him for being a union malcontent. When they filmed the famous fight scene in On the Waterfront, it took place on a barge, tied up in the very same location that I was looking upon.

Jack Webb had been active in radio for several years before Dragnet propelled him to national prominence. He had arrived at KGO, the ABC outlet in San Francisco, an unknown novice in 1945. Soon he was working as a staff announcer and disc jockey. His morning show, The Coffee Club, revealed his lifelong interest in jazz music, and in 1946 he was featured on a limited ABC-West network in the quarter-hour docudrama One out of Seven. His Jack Webb Show, also 1946, was a bizarre comedy series unlike anything else he ever attempted. His major break arrived with Pat Novak: for 26 weeks Webb played a waterfront detective in a series so hard-boiled it became high camp. He moved to Hollywood, abandoning Novak just as that series was hitting its peak. Mutual immediately slipped him into a Novak sound-alike, Johnny Modero: Pier 23, for the summer of 1947. He played leads and bit parts on such series as Escape, The Whistler, and This Is Your FBI. He began a film career: in He Walked by Night (1948), Webb played a crime lab cop. The film’s technical adviser was Sergeant Marty Wynn of the Los Angeles police. Webb and Wynn shared a belief that pure investigative procedure was dramatic enough without the melodrama of the private eye. The seeds of Dragnet were sown on a movie set.