"Elia Kazan was the mid-twentieth century's most sought-after director of both stage and screen. He directed virtually back-to-back the greatest American dramas of the era - by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams - and revolutionized theatre and film with dynamic action, poetic staging, and rigorous naturalism. His list of Broadway and Hollywood successes - A Streetcar Named Desire (stage and screen), All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, Cat on a Hot...

Terry Malloy is a washed-up ex-prize fighter corrupted along with brother Charley at an early age by a ruthless Mob-connected union boss named Johnny Friendly, who runs the waterfront. Malloy is now an errand-boy for the union, while Charley (in return for a college education) is now a lawyer for them. Malloy assists in the killing of a longshoreman who was talking to the crime commission investigating the union. He soon meets the dead man's agonized...

Magazine writer Schuyler 'Phil' Green, a widower who has just arrived with his mother and young son in New York, is assigned the task of writing an expose of anti-Semitism. As he searches for a new angle on the topic, he decides to pass as a Jew for several months, which causes no end of trouble for his ailing mother and young son. It also puts his new society girlfriend on the spot, since despite all her intellectual convictions, she cannot quite...