"I think [Leonard] Bernstein would correspond with me," conductor Artur Rodzinski once complained of his young charge, "only if my name were Darryl Zanuck or Spyros Skouras or one of those people who could do him some good." The elder musician, who once claimed that it was God Himself who told him to take Bernstein as his own assistant, must have felt that losing the ascendant younger talent to Hollywood—which, in the early and middle 1940s, seemed an imminent possibility—would have been sacrilege as well as an insult. Indeed, through various connections and channels, Bernstein's ties to the West Coast entertainment industry increased in turn as his renown as a musical polymath continued to grow. It eventually developed that Bernstein, certainly the possessor of matinee idol-quality looks and charm, was actually tested for a number of big-screen roles (mostly playing composers) at a time when such biopics offered plenty of romance and melodrama to the filmgoing public. Rodzinski and the musical world as a whole might indeed have viewed it as an act of providence that Bernstein was eventually turned down in each and every case. It thus came to pass that Bernstein "returned" to music wholly and for good and that Robert Alda, and not the future conductor of the New York Philharmonic, was hired to play the role of George Gershwin in Rhapsody in Blue (1945).

A decade later, Bernstein did return to Hollywood to work in the movies, and this time scored a resounding success as the composer of the music for Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954). Based on actual occurrences, the Academy Award-winning film, featuring Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger, Lee J. Cobb, Karl Malden, and Eva-Marie Saint, explores the complex relationships between the characters as they struggle with questions of morality, family loyalty, and shattered ambition. The personality of the city is portrayed in musical terms quite different from those, for example, in Gershwin's An American in Paris, or for that matter, in Bernstein's own On the Town. Kazan's—and in tandem, Bernstein's—vision of this metropolis is far more gothic and sinister. The underlying current of menace and mayhem and seeming futility fueled by the corruption at dockside is provided with stunning, often shocking, reinforcement from Bernstein's score. An extensive, pounding battery of percussion is used to aurally portray the violence of the unfolding events, underscored further by the harsh, hard-edged dissonance of brutal gestures in the brass section. A solo saxophone in the orchestra provides lonely, uneasy soliliquy, only to be subdued amid the growing threat of danger as the story progresses. The peculiar intimacy of the emerging relationship between Terry (Brando) and Edie (Saint) is evoked by a more tender mood in the score, but is likewise subsumed in the maelstrom of confusion and tragedy.

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