"Kazan unleashed a force of nature on the screen, a performance by an actor that was not a performance at all but an act of poetic truth revealed," Kinn and Piazza write of the director and his 1954 film. "Marlon Brando's Terry Malloy, the inarticulate lug whose simple and improvised gestures... revealed something true about the experience of being alive."
The movie was shot in Hoboken, New Jersey, the film's fictional setting.
According to the , while Brando said he improvised the famous "I could have been a contender" speech, screenwriter Budd Schulberg has the script with the speech written.
