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Nick Ripatrazone /

A Voice Crying Out ‘On the Waterfront’

Father Pete Barry elevates Elia Kazan’s classic film on its 70th anniversary.
On the set of On the Waterfront
American actors Karl Malden, Marlon Brando, and Eva Marie Saint on the set of 'On the Waterfront,' directed by Elia Kazan. (Photo by Columbia Pictures/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)

In 1950, a Jesuit priest sat across from a screenwriter at Billy the Oysterman on 20th Street in Manhattan. Father John Corridan agreed to meet Budd Schulberg at the restaurant to talk about what some considered his obsession, but what the priest called a vocation: breaking a crime ring that bilked longshoremen out of millions of dollars a year in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Nick Ripatrazone has written for Rolling Stone, GQ, and The Atlantic. His latest book is "The Habit of Poetry: The Literary Lives of Nuns in Mid-century America."

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