WE HAVE all seen it, or at least we all should have — the classic 1954 movie On the Waterfront — and in so doing we are all familiar with the iconic scene, when failed boxer Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) confronts his slick gangster brother Charley (Rod Steiger) in the back of the cab on its way to delivering Terry to his death for deciding to co-operate with an investigation into racketeering. The line “I coulda had class! I coulda been a contender!” remains one of the most celebrated and recognisable in the history of cinema.

On the Waterfront was written by Budd Schulberg and directed by Elia Kazan. It garnered eight Academy Awards, including an Oscar for best screenplay. The screenplay, the acting, the directing, the score, all broke new ground in the art of cinema. This in a movie that was devised and made as an apologia and justification for “snitching” by two men who — in Schulberg and Kazan —testified in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) against former associates, friends and comrades during the McCarthy anti-communist witchhunt era.

Budd Schulberg grew up in a world of wealth and privilege in Hollywood as the son of studio mogul, B.P. Schulberg, who himself was a FDR New Deal liberal. As a young man, he claimed to have been so ashamed of his father’s wealth and status that he said of the luxury car in which he was transported to school each morning, “I would lie on the floor and crawl out a block away so my schoolmates wouldn’t see my shame.”

Budd Schulberg left Hollywood to attend college in New York and in 1934 visited Moscow, where he attended the first Soviet Writers’ Congress and there met Maxim Gorky and Isaac Babel.

Upon graduating from college, Schulberg returned to Hollywood to embark on a career in movies as an entry-level writer at a time when screenwriters were treated as little more than factotums and paid accordingly. His preference and talent for writing prose soon met with success, however, with his short stories being picked up and published in leading national magazines. One of those stories — What Makes Sammy Run? — he went on to expand into his first novel.

Published in 1941, What Makes Sammy Run? tells the rags to riches story of a Jewish boy, Sammy Glick, who grows up in poverty in New York’s Lower East Side and determines early on to escape and make it big in Hollywood as a screenwriter. This he does by cheating and stepping on the toes of others, including friends. Considered an accurate portrayal of the movie industry, blowing the lid on a business that had always seen itself and been portrayed as the ultimate expression of the American Dream, the novel caused no small amount of controversy upon publication. It also earned its 27-year-old writer international acclaim.

As a novelist, Schulberg was part of the Hemingway generation — that group of post-WWII American novelists who were heavily influenced by Hemingway’s muscular and tightly written prose. And like Hemingway, Schulberg derived much of his inspiration as a writer from the Depression era of the 1930s and life on the hard and tough side of the streets. In 1942 he enlisted in the navy, where he served in famed film director John Ford’s documentary film unit. In this role in 1945, he was assigned to gather photographic evidence that was later used at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

After his success with What Makes Sammy Run?, Schulberg went on to write another classic novel, this time exploring corruption at the heart of boxing. Like the movie industry, the sport of boxing was an American obsession during the 1930s and 1940s, identified with providing the possibility of escape from poverty during the Depression for young men with nothing to offer except heart and courage. Published in 1947, The Harder They Fall is a classic morality tale whose 1956 movie adaptation starred Humphrey Bogart and Rod Steiger.

Boxing was Budd Schulberg’s abiding passion, inspiring some of his best writing. He witnessed up close most of the classic fights of the 20th century, describing them and the fighters involved with the epic sweep of a Greek dramatist. 

Schulberg’s essays on the significance of Joe Louis and the importance of Muhammad Ali in the sports and social history of a country mired in racism are without peer and still resonate to this day. His coverage of world championship fights in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s appeared in major publications such as Esquire, Playboy, and Sports Illustrated, and he was a regular fixture as a spectator at fights at Madison Square Garden in New York all the way into his 90s. Most fittingly, his writing on boxing was recognised in 2003, when he was inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame for his services to the sport. Regardless, it is his collaboration with Elia Kazan on that classic movie of the 20th century, On the Waterfront, that Budd Schulberg is best remembered.

On the Waterfront was, as mentioned, made in 1954. I came out three years after Schulberg testified in front the anti-communist House of Un-American Activities in Washington, where he named names. He revealed that he was a member of the Communist Party from 1936 to 1939, leaving in protest against the Hitler-Stalin Pact. He claimed that the party tried to influence his first novel, What Makes Sammy Run? and went on to name 15 former friends and colleagues as having been members of the American Communist Party and other left-wing groups.

Throughout his life thereafter, Schulberg remained unrepentant about his decision to testify, claiming that he had only named those who had already been named and that his testimony was moot because government moles within the party had already secured the names of its members.

Judy Chaikin, director of an Emmy-nominated documentary about the Hollywood blacklist, took a different view. Chaikin: “Both Kazan and Schulberg had tremendous guilt feelings that they continuously rationalised in order to live with themselves. Schulberg’s testimony was a vain attempt to cleanse himself before the (HUAC) committee and save his career.”

Though the sport of boxing may have provided Schulberg with a sense of moral compass in a time when mass poverty scarred America, his betrayal of the very ideals and ideology which offered an alternative future for those afflicted by it should never be forgetton. As Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) proclaimed in On the Waterfront: “Conscience … that stuff can drive you nuts!”