On the Waterfront

I could have been a contender, I could have been somebody.'' So speaks the haunted former boxer Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) to his brother Charley (Rod Steiger) in a scene from On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954) that is one of the most famous in all cinema. Set among unionised New York longshoremen, Kazan''s film (from a screenplay by Budd Schulberg) recounts Terry''s struggle against corruptio...