In 1949 The New York Sun ran a series of 24 articles under the heading “Crime on the Waterfront” by Malcolm Johnson, which won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting. Five years later, on November 5 – 50 years ago today – the film “On the Waterfront” was released. For the next week, Film Forum will be showing the film with a new restoration from the original camera negative and a digitally remastered soundtrack.

When director Elia Kazan and his screenwriter, Bud Schulberg, took the proposed film to Darryl Zanuck, he dismissed them, asking, “Who’s going to care about a bunch of sweaty longshoremen?” He had a point – the story of longshoremen in Hoboken, N.J., attempting to overthrow a corrupt and violent union, sounds a lot more worthy than entertaining. So Kazan and Mr. Schulberg went to Sam Spiegel instead and cast Frank Sinatra in the lead, supported by a list of greats – Lee J. Cobb, Karl Malden, and Rod Steiger, alongside newcomer Eva Marie Saint.

Sinatra, a Hoboken native, was replaced before shooting began by Marlon Brando, a bigger star at the time. Brando had initially balked at working with Kazan; though Kazan had essentially created Brando professionally, he had also named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee, a move that shocked liberal circles in Hollywood and New York and rendered him a social outcast. Still, Brando knew a good script when he saw it, and he was too good and ambitious an actor to let politics get in the way of art.

Kazan saw the struggle of Brando’s ex-prizefighter Terry Malloy as parallel to his own struggle with the backlash against his cooperation with HUAC. “If there is a better performance by a man in the history of film in America,” Kazan later wrote about Brando’s performance, “I don’t know what it is.” Tough, sensitive, pained, and adorable, Brando played the union informant as a saintly everyman.

He himself, though, was every bit the prima donna, leaving the set every day at 4 p.m. to visit his therapist. In the most quoted shot in the film – the taxicab scene, in which Brando mumbles “I coulda been a contender”- he left the set before Kazan had filmed Steiger’s close-up reaction shots.