On The Waterfront Essay, Research Paper

When I went to see the movie ?On the Waterfront?, I thought that I was going to be bored because the movie was in black and white. But as I started to watch the movie it got more and more interesting. Then the next day I got to hear Dr. James Fisher lecture on this movie and he brought a whole new light of mind into my head. I though that ?On the Waterfront? was a movie about some gangsters that controlled a labor union of dockworkers. Even though I thought that, I was wrong because Dr. Fisher said the movie ?Represented a way to rationalize the communist and how people were scared to testify against things the communist party did.? That just made me think a totally different way about the movie and I understood what he was saying.

Although, he said that he was not the only person to see that movie in that view, I thought it was unique. When I saw the movie it was very interesting. The movie was about a ex-boxer Terry played by Marlon Brando and his brother Charlie who are involved with a corrupt union boss named Johnny Friendly who is responsible for the death of a dockworker named Joey. Trouble brews when the ex-boxer is influenced by a crusading priest and turns against his boss. A woman named Edy influences Terry a lot because the dockworker who got killed was her brother and she wanted some answers on why he was dead. So when Terry meets Edy he starts to fall for her and she influences him to tell the truth about her brothers? death and the corrupt union boss. That is what I saw the movie was about.

Then Dr. Fisher talked about how the movie came about. It came about because a Jesuit priest named John Corridan was on a special mission to clean up the waterfront union. Then Corridan run into a writer named Shulburg and then they worked a deal with Sam Spiegel of Columbia Pictures and the movie was produced. Also, Dr. Fisher talked about Truth to Power, the Christian effort. I thought that was an interesting saying.

In conclusion, the lecture by Dr. Fisher was very interesting along with the movie ?On the Waterfront? he lectured on. He showed me that movies are sometimes symbolized about things that are going in the real world, but shown in a different way. The movie was a film that exemplified the way self-appointed tyrants can defeat by right-thinking people in a vital democracy and thus avoiding the main problem, which is how tyrants achieve power in the first place. This defeats them not by persuasive convictions about democracy but by the old movie saying ?revenge and the strength that comes from love.? And in this movie it is shows how when a man loves a woman it can overcome the strength of union bosses to get revenge.