N.Y. / REGION

The Real Rough-Talking Priest Behind ‘On the Waterfront’

Marlon Brando and Karl Malden in “On the Waterfront” (1954). Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images 
Q. Was the role of the priest who was played by Karl Malden in the movie “On the Waterfront” based on a real priest?
A. Absolutely. The Rev. John M. Corridan, a Jesuit priest who fought corruption and the exploitation of longshoremen in New York Harbor, not only advised Budd Schulberg, who wrote the film’s screenplay, and Elia Kazan, the director, but even lent his hat and coat to Mr. Malden during shooting, according to “Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront,” by Nathan Ward (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Mr. Kazan, whom Mr. Schulberg introduced to Father Corridan in a bar, at first couldn’t believe that the rough-talking, heavy-smoking waterfront expert was really a priest, Mr. Ward wrote.
Father Corridan grew up mostly on the West Side of Manhattan, where his mother raised five sons on a police widow’s pension. After his ordination in 1945, he became associate director of the Xavier Institute of Labor Relations on West 16th Street, whose classes on labor organizing were aimed at inoculating union workers against gangsterism and communism. He crusaded against the shape-up system of hiring, in which dock workers had to compete daily for jobs, often at the price of illicit payments. In a sermon quoted by Mr. Ward, Father Corridan pictured Christ as a dockworker. “He knows that he is expected to be deaf, dumb and blind, if he wants to work,” he thundered. “Some people think that the crucifixion only took place on Calvary.”
The priest’s persistence and encyclopedic knowledge of corruption on the docks spurred congressional and state hearings, labor-law changes and the formation of a Waterfront Commission by New York and New Jersey. He also was the subject of a 1955 book, “Waterfront Priest,” by Allen Raymond. He died in 1984. In 2006, the Waterfront Commission christened a 500-horsepower police launch the “Rev. John M. Corridan.”