Both the writer, Budd Schulberg, and the director, Elia Kazan, had testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and Brando's final transition from perceived stool pigeon to defiant hero is sometimes interpreted as their justification for their own actions. Whether this is so or not is unimportant, though it gives an added point of interest. Brando's performance as the inarticulate former pug whose inherent decency forces him, reluctantly, to take on the hoodlums is magnificient. And yet, in the much-paradied car scene wherein he delivers the 'contender' speech, he is almost acted off the screen by Steiger, appearing in only his second film. But then the entire cast is excellent and for once the Method style of acting, which they all embrace, is exactly right.

Schulberg, who wrote the script from Malcolm Johnson's Pulitzer Prize-winning articles about the work of a Jesuit priest (played by Karl Malden), later developed his screenplay into a novel and gave it a more downbeat, but undoubtedly more likely, ending. An introductory note tot he film claims optimistically that corruption can be beaten by constitutional means; Schulberg's novel suggests realistically thhat it can't.