A dim-witted yet kind-hearted boxer, Terry Malloy, who failed to succeed unintentionally lures a man to his death after being tricked by a criminal called Johnny Friendly whose men pick of every man who has the courage to speak up to their crimes. As he works on the waterfronts that Friendly owns, he is sent to a church meeting run by a good preacher about how to deal with the problem and runs into the dead man’s sister. Slowly, he falls in love with her and begins to feel guilt about his crime.
Anyone interested in the relationship between Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, the writing of The Crucible and the now-orthodox reading of On the Waterfront as a response to testifying at HUAC should absolutely read Stacy Schiff's piece in the New York Review of Books:
Miller made clear that he thought Kazan naive. He was about to humiliate himself and sacrifice others to a band of cynical fanatics who comported themselves like mobsters but lacked the moral code even of that trade. The panic would subside, Miller insisted. He had not held his friend’s earlier, private HUAC testimony against him. It was consistent with his integrity. But Kazan acted now from fear rather than conviction. He was morally in the wrong. Miller felt, as he put it decades later, “a quiet calamity opening before me in the woods.” […]
