A very Catholic moment in the 1954 movie " On the Waterfront " : EDIE : " Isn't everybody a part of everybody else " " TERRY : " You really believe that drool ? " EDIE : " Yes , I do . "

Eva Marie Saint—in her first film role, twenty-nine years old but seeming younger, raw-nerved, fragile, blazing—plays Edie. She’s virtually the only woman in the picture, an apparitional beauty—not unlike Brando, for that matter—surrounded by hulking dockworkers, characters named Moose and Truck and Slim. Terry is featured in nearly every scene—Schulberg deftly channels the story through him, tracking his uncertainty, his growing sense of shame and responsibility—and he shares more screen time with Edie than with any other character. Saint holds her own with Brando, matching him moment for moment. In their scenes together—Kazan’s favorite scenes in the film, he said—we see impossible distances closing between two people separated by barriers of temperament, breeding, guilt, grief, and fear. In the central, heartbreaking bar scene, the movie settles into a volley of “simple” over-the-shoulder shots and close-ups, during which Brando and Saint register attraction and resistance, yearning and bitterness. [ EDIE: Isn’t everybody part of everybody else? TERRY: You really believe that drool? EDIE: Yes, I do.] These lines trump the earnest Christian sermonizing that Father Barry unloads elsewhere in the film, and they set the stage for the sacrifice that Terry doesn’t yet realize he’s capable of. And it’s here, in the bar, that Saint lowers her face and her voice sinks to a moan—“Can you please help me, for God’s sake?”—and Brando, cupping his chin in his hand, reveals a matching anguish—“I’d like to help, but there’s nothin’ I can do”—and Leonard Bernstein’s music kicks in, his first and only film score, crystallizing their tenderness, their pain; and Edie touches Terry’s face—“You would if you could”—and forgives him. The scene is simply one of the absolute glories of American filmmaking.