Reception
Upon its release, the film received rave reviews from critics. On the critics' website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 100% "Certified Fresh" rating, based on 50 reviews. In 1989, this film was deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Film critic Roger Ebert lauded the film, stating that Brando and Kazan changed acting in American movies forever and then adding it to his "Great Movies" list. The New York Times critic A. H. Weiler also hailed the film as a masterpiece, calling it "an uncommon powerful, exciting, and imaginative use of the screen by gifted professionals."
It is also on the Vatican's list of 45 greatest films of all time, compiled in 1995.
The film earned an estimated $4.2 million in rentals at the North American box office in 1954.
Read more about this topic: On The Waterfront
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)