Actor · 1919–1996

Martin Balsam

4: briefs
13:00: average
52 min: in total

On film.briefs4

On the Waterfront

Elia Kazan · 1954

On the Waterfront (1954), directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg, follows ex-prizefighter Terry Malloy as he confronts his complicity in union violence on the Hoboken docks. Shot on location in black-and-white by Boris Kaufman, with a sparse score by Leonard Bernstein, it charts Terry’s slow, painful shift from silence to testimony. Marlon Brando’s performance redefined screen acting through physical restraint and vocal hesitation. Though anchored in 1950s labour politics, its concerns — loyalty, shame, dignity, and the bodily reality of conscience — remain immediate.

13:00

12 Angry Men

Sidney Lumet · 1957

Sidney Lumet's first feature takes Reginald Rose's 1954 teleplay and confines it almost entirely to a jury room, where eleven men ready to convict a teenager of murder are worked, one by one, toward doubt. Shot in three weeks on a budget of $340,000, it turns a single set into an escalating study of temper, prejudice and procedure, carried by an ensemble led by Henry Fonda, who also produced.

13:00

All the President's Men

Alan J. Pakula · 1976

Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman play Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein chasing a break-in story that grows into the reporting that helped end a presidency, told almost entirely from inside the newsroom.

13:00

Psycho

Alfred Hitchcock · 1960

Hitchcock financed Psycho himself after Paramount balked at the material, shooting it fast, cheap and in black and white with his television crew. Anthony Perkins's Norman Bates, Bernard Herrmann's string score and a mid-film murder that removes the film's ostensible heroine turned a low-budget genre picture into the template for the modern horror thriller.