WE’VE all seen the movie and we’re 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 on the waterfront.

The line “I coulda had class! I coulda been a contender!” remains one of the most celebrated and recognisable in movie history.

On The Waterfront was written by Budd Schulberg and directed by Elia Kazan.

It won eight Academy Awards, including an Oscar for best screenplay.

The screenplay, the acting, the directing and the score all broke new ground in the art of cinema in a movie devised and made as an apologia and justification for “snitching” by two men who’d testified in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) against former associates, friends and comrades during the McCarthy era.

Schulberg grew up in a world of wealth and privilege in Hollywood as the son of studio mogul BP Schulberg, a 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 school mates wouldn’t see my shame.”

He left Hollywood to attend college in New York and in 1934 visited Moscow, where he attended the first Soviet Writers’ Congress and 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 soon being picked up and published in leading national magazines.

One of those stories — What Makes Sammy Run? — Schulberg expanded into his first novel. Published in 1941, it earned its 27-year-old writer international acclaim.

As a novelist, Schulberg was part of the Hemingway generation — that group of post WWII US novelists who were heavily influenced by Hemingway’s muscular and tightly written prose.

And like Hemingway, Schulberg was a huge fan of boxing, about which he wrote prodigiously and well.

Indeed, after his success with What Makes Sammy Run? Schulberg went on to write another classic novel, this time exploring corruption at the heart of the sport.

As with cinema, boxing was a US 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. 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.

His essays on Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali are still without peer.

Of Ali over his stance against the war in Vietnam, he once wrote: “Wounded by all those arrows of our social misfortune, he refused to die.”

Schulberg also famously referred to boxing as “showbusiness with blood.”

Fittingly, his voluminous articles and essays on boxing were recognised in 2003, when he was inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame for his services to the sport.

Be that as it may, it will be for his collaboration with Elia Kazan on that classic movie of the 20th century, On The Waterfront, that Schulberg will best be remembered — though for many of his contemporaries, and for many looking back on this period today, not with honour but disdain.

The movie was produced in 1954, three years after Schulberg testified in front of HUAC and named names.

He revealed that he was a member of the Communist Party from 1936 to 1939, leaving in protest at 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 former members of the Communist Party and other left-wing groups, among them fellow screenwriters such as Ring Lardner Jnr, who were blacklisted as a result.

Unlike Kazan, Schulberg was not subpoenaed to testify before HUAC, nor did he take the Fifth Amendment in order to avoid naming names and incriminating himself.

Instead he appeared and testified voluntarily after himself being named by a former associate as a former member of the Communist Party. 

Schulberg maintained that he testified before HUAC as a patriotic American. It was a view Dalton Trumbo, one of the famed Hollywood Ten who refused to testify and was blacklisted in consequence, took umbrage with, writing in a letter to a friend that “show me the man who informs on his friends who have harmed no-one, and who thereafter earns money he could not have before, and I will show you not a decent citizen, not a patriot, but a miserable scoundrel.”

Schulberg remained unrepentant about his decision to testify, claiming that he’d only named those who’d already been named and that his testimony was moot because government moles within the Communist 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: “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 committee and save his career.”

As failed boxing contender Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) proclaims in On The Waterfront: “Conscience … that stuff can drive you nuts!”