On the Waterfront is one of the earliest and most effective attempts to suppress politics with morality and private values that the fifties produced. It takes an important first step in detaching the self from a larger social context so that the idea of self can be redefined in narrower, safer terms. Splendor in the Grass, America, America, and The Arrangement merely develop the notion of personality initially presented in On the Waterfront….

Films like Viva Zapata! and On the Waterfront bear the marks, the inscription, as the French would say, of their historical context. They cannot be fully understood outside the passionate political controversies of which they were part. (p. 26)

[On the Waterfront] is political allegory cast in the form of a morality play. This requires a particularly skillful form of aesthetic footwork, since its success requires that the political allegory be simultaneously admitted and refused. To...