The Priest Who Made Budd Schulberg Run:

On the Waterfront and Jesuit Social Action

When best-selling author Budd Schulberg told the Rev. John M. Corridan, S.J., in 1949 that he wanted to write a screenplay about corruption on the New York waterfront, the fast-talking, chain-smoking labor priest was dismissive. “We don’t need a Hollywood movie,” Schulberg remembered Father Corridan saying. “We’re doing tough stuff down here.”

But Schulberg, whose 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run? depicted the predatory side of the film industry, had no intention of working on a typical Hollywood movie. And Father Corridan, annoyed that a conspiracy of silence seemed to be keeping most New Yorkers oblivious to waterfront injustice, had no intention of driving away an idealistic writer who was generously angry.

Known for his encyclopedic knowledge of the waterfront and his great-hearted concern for the plight of the longshoremen, Father Corridan introduced Schulberg to the dissident workers who gathered in local bars and in the basement of St. Francis Xavier Labor School on West 16th Street, where the Jesuit priest had been working since 1946.

Five years after their initial meeting, Schulberg’s screenplay for On the Waterfront, the 1954 classic starring Marlon Brando as a dockworker who stands up to his corrupt union bosses, won an Academy Award.

On April 29, during the Fifth Annual Russo Lecture, before a crowd of more than 200 in the McNally Amphitheater, Schulberg recalled his friendship with Father Corridan—who was the model for Father Pete Barry, played by Karl Malden in the film—and described the priest’s passionate commitment to social justice.

Although New York City’s docks were thriving in the late 1940s, Schulberg said, profitability was coming at a high human cost. In a Pulitzer-Prize winning series of articles titled “Crime on the Waterfront”—published in the old New York Sun in November and December 1948—Malcolm Johnson had described the docks as a kind of outlaw frontier. Schulberg said he read the articles with horrified amazement and later saw firsthand that Johnson’s description was right on. Mobsters and racketeers, often with the help of union leaders and the complicity of the police, dominated the waterfront, demanding daily kickbacks and using murder and threats of violence to keep the longshoremen in a state of terror. Many workers were forced to choose, as Schulberg had Brando’s character choose in the film, between honoring their fear or their faith, their self-interest or their self-respect.

“Father Corridan was filling a vacuum,” said Schulberg. “He was serving as the true union leader that [the longshoremen] didn’t have…teaching them what their rights were, how they could stay together and attract more members. He was building a rebel movement…giving the men a sense of hope that if they got together, stood up to those that run the docks, eventually they could clean up the union and get the rights that automobile and steel workers already had.”

Schulberg conducted a great deal of research in waterfront bars. Different bars, he explained, were used as different headquarters. There were mob bars and bars friendly to the union insurgents, where he talked boxing and drank boilermakers with the men—“If you don’t drink,” he was told, “they’ll be suspicious”—all the while discovering much about the waterfront, its characters and how it was run. He also observed the daily shape-ups, where dock bosses would select only the longshoremen they needed for a particular job, leaving the rest to wait in a local gin mill before getting another shot at a day’s work. The practice was demeaning, rife with favoritism and, Schulberg said, a “way of keeping the men in fear, intimidated, playing one man versus the other.”

Schulberg’s research and his high regard for Father Corridan’s work soon bore fruit in articles for the New York Times Magazine, Commonweal and the Saturday Evening Post. But it took five years for his Academy Award-winning screenplay to reach a mass audience, largely because all the major Hollywood studios had turned it down, claiming it was too dark. Sam Spiegel, an independent producer, eventually took it on and, with Elia Kazan directing, shot the film in 35 days in Hoboken, N.J., on a modest $800,000 budget.

Toward the end of the lecture, James Fisher, Ph.D., acting director of Fordham’s Center for American Catholic Studies and the evening’s host, played a scene from On the Waterfront, calling it perhaps the “best expression of the broader tradition of Jesuit social action” on film.

The scene takes place in the hold of a ship, soon after one of the dissident workers is silenced, killed in an “accident” rigged by the corrupt union leaders. Father Barry, played by Malden, preaches over the dead man’s body, shouting: “Some people think the Crucifixion only took place on Calvary, but they better wise up! Every time the mob puts the crusher on a good man, tries to keep him from doing his duty as a citizen, it’s a crucifixion!”

Although perhaps not as well known as Brando’s “I coulda been a contender” speech later in the movie, Father Barry’s stirring sermon is the spiritual heart of the film. And it is based on a speech Schulberg heard Father Corridan give on more than one occasion. “Eighty percent of it is his words,” Schulberg said. “All I did was put it in a more dramatic context.”

The audience in McNally applauded at the conclusion of the brief screening, and Schulberg took several questions. One member of the audience asked him how he felt, “as a Jewish man, to be doing such a goyish film” featuring a Catholic priest.

“I thought of Jesus as a very, very moving Jewish prophet,” Schulberg explained. “I agreed with so much of the social message of Jesus and I was moved by it, and further moved by the depth of the commitment of people like Father Corridan. … It wasn’t a problem for me.”

—Ryan Stellabotte