Fisher, James T. (2009). On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York. Cornell Univ PressIt was into this milieu that a 35-year-old Jesuit priest arrived in 1946, setting out to liberate the waterfront's oppressed longshoremen. Moved by the social-justice teachings of the Catholic Church, the Rev. John Corridan tried to inspire the men on the docks to take on the Irish kingpins who held them in grinding poverty. But the codes of the waterfront proved too tough to crack, even for a priest who swore and drank like a longshoremen. The men maintained their silence and rejected Father Corridan as an outsider and a meddler.
Undeterred, Father Corridan shifted his focus, aiming to expose the criminal waterfront to public scrutiny. He cultivated journalists and fed them vital inside information, starting with Malcolm Johnson, a New York Sun reporter who in 1948 wrote a sensational multi-part exposé, "Crime on the Waterfront." By the early 1950s the publicizing efforts of "the waterfront priest" led to the creation of the New York State Crime Commission, an investigative body that gathered 30,000 pages of testimony and evidence that eventually brought down King Joe and his empire.
Mr. Fisher details the dockside story with admirable care, but the story he is most eager to tell is the one about the making of the movie "On the Waterfront." In 1949, a production company bought the rights to Johnson's exposé and hired Budd Schulberg to transform it into a screenplay. Schulberg soon befriended Father Corridan, who showed him the real waterfront. According to Mr. Fisher, this dynamic if unlikely partnership—between a secular Jew and a liberal Catholic priest—is the film's essential back-story. Mr. Fisher argues that Schulberg was converted by Father Corridan, not to Catholicism but to a spiritually based understanding of social justice. As a result, Schulberg acceded to Father Corridan's plea that he write a "Going My Way" with substance—that is, a serious drama that addressed themes of morality, betrayal and redemption.
Despite the controversy, "On the Waterfront" has proved to be of enduring value. The same cannot be said of the New York waterfront. For while the Irish kingpins were trying to fend off prosecutors, they were working to stymie efforts to modernize the waterfront's decrepit piers. With the advent of modern container ships in 1956—just two years after "On the Waterfront" opened—New York's port lost all commercial logic and the Irish waterfront began a swift journey to extinction.
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