Budd Schulberg wrote the screenplay for the film released in 1954, starring Marlon Brando the contender. On the heels of that success he published a novelization a year later. Then in 1984, he wrote a stage adaptation which premiered on Broadway. It used lasers (!) and surround sound systems which were technological innovations for the time. The chronology is somewhat confusing because usually movies follow the play, and plays follow the novel, but in this case everything was reversed. I listened to the full-cast LATW production of the stage play and found it to be very good. Amazingly I never saw the movie nor knew the story so this radio play was my first exposure. I did read that the ending of the film is "Hollywood" whereas the play (and novel) are more "realistic". Presumably he gets the girl in the film, what happens here I leave to the reader to find out. This story concerns issues that are somewhat arcane today - with the rise of the shipping container the old-fashioned dock worker has morphed into the Minecraft architect, moving around giant cubes with giant machines. Even by 1954 the beginnings of this revolution were starting to take shape. Nevertheless, it has a timeless quality concerning doing what is right versus what is expected. The characters are memorable though probably even more so on the screen with Bernstein's score. ( )