Since most people today know the New York working port only through this film (which was actually shot in Hoboken, New Jersey, with the city's skyline tantalizingly backgrounded), it is worth reconsidering it. On the Waterfront is one of those film classics that, to me at least, doesn't hold up: shrill, rhetorical, its plot scheme of guilt and redemption rammed through to the percussive nudgings of an urbanjungle Leonard Bernstein score, its hysteria allows not a moment's relaxed cinematic breathing, save for one courtship scene on a park bench. Certainly Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint are still riveting-she translucent, powderwhite, like a Kabuki lioness; he, the sensitive, inarticulate, darkly frowning star, on his way from Stanley Kowalski to Napoleon-yet at no moment can we accept her as a college girl from New Jersey taught by nuns, just as he, for all his charismatic charm, seems incredible as Terry Malloy, the exboxer whose brains are partly scrambled, but whose pigeonloving heart stays tenderly intact. The other acting is aggressively stylized: squashedface secondaries recruited from the ring and the Actors Studio, led by Lee J. Cobb in his snarling, Yiddish Theater Italian mobster mode; Rod Steiger's robotically mannered vocal hesitancies, meshing in the backseat with Brando's workingclass lisp, all fun to watch, up to a point. But Karl Maiden is unbearably hammy with his sermons, and the religious symbolism (Steiger dangling spreadarmed from a hook, Brando browbloodied near the end, Maiden yammering that every waterfront victim is a "crucifixion") seems maudlinly overdone. Screenwriter Budd Schulberg and director Elia Kazan allowed themselves to interpret the waterfront zone as Calvary. Harry Cohn, the head of the studio that produced On the Waterfront, had expected the picture to flop, partly because of its artiness, but the movie did well at the box office and even won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Only the unions were unhappy, protesting what they saw as an unfair emphasis on "labor crime." THE WATERFRONT COMMISSION, established in the aftermath of the crime hearings, cleaned up the docks a good deal, especially seeing to it that exconvicts were driven out of the locals. If anything, they became a little too puritanically strict in their rules against those with criminal records. Not that the New York waterfront lost all its ties with organized crime; but with the preponderance of shipping relocated, the problem became defused. The Port Authority simply moved the whole operation, lock, stock, and barrel, to containerport facilities in Elizabeth, New Jersey (whose marshland was a lot cheaper to acquire than Gotham real estate), and Port Newark, keeping only a few symbolic pieces of a container port in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and Howland Hook, Staten Island. Could the city have done a better job of retaining its working port? Were the harbor commissioners asleep at the switch? Teddy Gleason, the head of the ILA, used to say, "You know what I see when I look down at Battery Park City? I see a container port that could have been.