Best Waterfront Movies & TV Shows

Discover the inspired designs, architecture and stories behind some of the most beautiful waterfront cottages in America. With each unique home, experience a firsthand look at the joy that comes from living on the water.

Director Allan Dwan’s excellent use of New York locations enlivens a rags-to-riches tale that fully exploits star George O’Brien’s championship boxing prowess.

Terry Malloy dreams about being a prize fighter, while tending his pigeons and running errands at the docks for Johnny Friendly, the corrupt boss of the dockers union. Terry witnesses a murder by two of Johnny's thugs, and later meets the dead man's sister and feels responsible for his death. She introduces him to Father Barry, who tries to force him to provide information for the courts that will smash the dock racketeers.

Set on an island off the coast of New England in the summer of 1965, Moonrise Kingdom tells the story of two twelve-year-olds who fall in love, make a secret pact, and run away together into the wilderness. As various authorities try to hunt them down, a violent storm is brewing off-shore – and the peaceful island community is turned upside down in more ways than anyone can handle.

A young woman reunites with the father she's not seen since early childhood, also falls in love with a sailor who wishes to marry her, and eventually is forced to reveal to each man about her dark past. (NOTE: This is the German language version.)

Cleo lives in Marseilles and works as a waitress in a waterfront dive. A stranger entices her into coming to Paris to take dancing lessons, but instead she is taken to a baron, who betrays her. In spite of this inauspicious start, Cleo becomes a successful and renowned actress, but her feelings about men have never recovered. She loathes them and uses them only for the money they offer her, which she then hands over to a penniless girl.

Snobbish attorney Charles 'Beauty' Steele loses his wife due to his drinking and his heirs at the same time that his brother-in-law absconds with funds belonging to one of Steele's clients. In search of the thief, Steele is attacked and left for dead. He is rescued by a kindly couple, but suffers from amnesia. He starts life afresh and is happy, until the return of his memory sends him back to resolve his old involvements.

In New York City, an insolent pickpocket, Skip McCoy, inadvertently sets off a chain of events when he targets ex-prostitute Candy and steals her wallet. Unaware that she has been making deliveries of highly classified information to the communists, Candy, who has been trailed by FBI agents for months in hopes of nabbing the spy ringleader, is sent by her ex-boyfriend, Joey, to find Skip and retrieve the valuable microfilm he now holds.

A blue-collar worker on New York's depressed waterfront finds his life changed after he saves a woman attempting suicide.

Zack Mayo is an aloof, taciturn man who aspires to be a navy pilot. Once he arrives at training camp for his 13-week officer's course, Mayo runs afoul of abrasive, no-nonsense drill Sergeant Emil Foley. Mayo is an excellent cadet, but a little cold around the heart, so Foley rides him mercilessly, sensing that the young man would be prime officer material if he weren't so self-involved. Zack's affair with a working girl is likewise compromised by his unwillingness to give of himself.

Theodore Hickman, a hardware salesman, makes by-yearly visits to Harry Hope's 1910-era waterfront bar for his periodical drinking binges. But on this visit he has decided to try to save the bar's patrons from their "lying pipe dreams."

A fallen woman seeks redemption at a Singapore rubber plantation. Melodrama.

A fledgling producer finds himself at odds with his workers, financiers and his greedy ex-wife when he tries to produce live musicals for movie-going audiences.

The East Side Kids find a young girl in the apartment of a man who has just been murdered. Believing her to be innocent, they hide her in their clubhouse while they try to find the real killer. The killer, however, used a baseball bat as his murder weapon, and the bat has the fingerprints of one of the gang on it.

One night in the New Orleans slums, vicious hoodlum Blackie and his friends kill an illegal immigrant who won too much in a card game. The next morning, Dr. Clint Reed of the Public Health Service confirms the dead man had pneumonic plague. To prevent a catastrophic epidemic, Clint must find and inoculate the killers and their associates, with the reluctant aid of police captain Tom Warren, despite official skepticism, and in total secrecy, lest panic empties the city. Can a doctor turn detective? He has 48 hours to try.

George Taylor returns from WWII with amnesia. Back home in Los Angeles, he tries to track down his old identity, stumbling into a 3-year old murder case and a hunt for a missing $2 million.

A former boxer --now taxi driver-- gets mixed up with jewel thieves.

When a prominent official is murdered at a banquet honoring Charle Chan, the detective and son Lee team up to expose an opium-smuggling ring.

Min, the owner of a dockside hotel, is forced to make difficult decisions about the future of Nancy, the young woman she took in as an infant.

Reeling from the unexpected death of her husband, Beth is left alone in the lakeside home he built for her. Soon she begins to uncover her recently deceased husband's disturbing secrets.

Waterfront couple raise their son to be a sea captain. He grows up to be rather snotty and rebels against drunken Beery. Valiant Dressler keeps things moving even as hubby ruins their tugboat business.

An undercover officer tracks waterfront corruption from California to New Orleans and back.

Jaunty young policeman Danny Dolan falls in love with waterfront cafe waitress Helen Riley.

Ex-convict Eddie and his wife, Kristine, attempt to build a new life for themselves and their daughter Kathy in San Francisco, but police officer Mike Vido is determined to send Eddie back to prison.

A hard-living dockworker finds religion until his brother is murdered.

When ship's fireman Peter McCabe walks out on his long-suffering wife, he leaves her impoverished, with two young daughters and a boy born soon after his departure. After an absence of fourteen years McCabe returns, sacked and humiliated, trailing trouble in his wake.

The tables turn for cynical police officer Richard Beck when he's viciously attacked by two homicidal crooks. Having never been empathetic toward the victims he's dealt with on a daily basis, Beck must now confront the tough system he was a part of. As he struggles to regain his status at work, he also must make sure those responsible for his attack are prosecuted.

For Capt. Robert John Evans, smuggling black-market goods is nothing out of the ordinary. But one day he's hired by Aristides Mavros for a more involved assignment -- sneaking an imprisoned American out of communist-controlled territory. The job seems challenging enough, but when he meets the prisoner's sultry wife, Sylvia, he realizes his mission comes with a startling catch: Not only must he rescue this man, he must bring him back from the dead.

After a drunken night out, a longshoreman thinks he may have killed a man.

A hopelessly hopeful drifter, a bitter young woman, and a helpless child live on the docks, spending their days in poverty and listless wandering. Overhead, a dredge hauls up mud and trash from the nearby seabed-- the same mud and trash from the day before. They finally decide to leave for the city to seek fulfillment, only to encounter further privation, destitution, temptation.

A boy gets involved in a bank robbery

When the elderly woman sponsoring a treasure hunt is murdered on board her docked ship, Charlie Chan must deal with a treasure map in four pieces, the ghost of a hanged pirate, a talking parrot, a recalcitrant sea captain and several suspicious passengers - and a second murder.

A wealthy woman funds an underwater expedition to explore for marine life, but what she doesn't know is that her "colleagues" have other intentions.

Old sailor Chris Christofferson eagerly awaits the arrival of his grown daughter Anna, whom he sent at five years old to live with relatives in Minnesota. He has not seen her since, but believes her to be a decent and respectably employed young woman. When Anna arrives, however, it is clear that she has lived a hard life in the dregs of society, and that much of spirit has been extinguished. She falls in love with a young sailor rescued at sea by her father, but dreads to reveal to him the truth of her past. Both father and young man are deluded about her background, yet Anna cannot quite bring herself to allow them to remain deluded.

Cleo Moore stars as Mary Adams, whose first step on the road to ruin is a $25,000 robbery. Mary hides the money, then confesses to the crime, secure in the belief that she can dig up the loot upon her release from prison.

The real-life deportation of gangster Lucky Luciano was the inspiration for this romanticized and slightly crackbrained crime drama. Jeff Chandler plays the Luciano counterpart, who once he arrives in Italy renews his criminal activities.

Two warring gang families (one African-American, the other Chinese) maneuver for bragging rights to the Oakland, California, docks. Hang Sing and Trish O'Day uncover a trail of deceit that leaves most of the warring factions dead … or worse!

Set in 1912, inside a dive bar named The Last Chance Saloon, its destitute patrons eagerly await the arrival of Hickey, who arrives annually and props everyone up with free drinks and spirited stories of his travels. However, when Hickey does show up this year, it is with a message of temperance and an exhortation to give up hopeless dreams and face reality.

The US Government tries to track down embedded Nazi agents in the States.

The gang is sent to the Wilton Reform School after they are unjustly convicted of stealing a truck. Bill Collins, brother of co-leader Danny, becomes involved in a killing and, while also innocent, is convicted and sentenced to death. Through a series of events, Muggs, Glimpy, Danny and the rest of the gang, learn that Knobby, a henchman of Luke Manning, knows something about the murder.

Spencer is a cat person. Laura is a dog person. Spencer is headed to a beach town to work on his thesis. Laura is coming to the same beach town to escape the shambles of her life. Their personalities couldn’t be more different, but when a reservation screw up lands them – and their pets – in the same vacation rental house, they all have to figure out how to get along with each other.

A thriller in which a battle of philosophies between a fundamentalist Christian and an atheist escalates into a lethal battle of wills.

When a police officer is murdered, Captain Street looks to Mr. Wong to catch the killer. Prime Suspect: Frank Belden Jr., whose father is a businessman well known for both his success and dishonesty. Mr. Wong faces increasing danger and is nearly executed himself as the investigation develops in treachery and complexity. As Mr. Wong follows the trail of dead bodies, he uncovers a jewel smuggling ring on the San Francisco waterfront and a case much larger than the death of a police officer.

Two men vie for the heart of a Cypress Gardens swimming star.

A young reporter tries to prove her mettle by exposing a liquor racketeering gang.

A framed reporter and the crooks on his trail scramble to locate a book containing the names of American war profiteers and traitors who collaborated with the Nazis during the war.

Longshoreman Johnny Barnes is in love with Kitty Tracy, barmaid at her father's waterfront saloon, and he beats up Cassidy, a crooked politician who has been annoying her. Cassidy is murdered that night and Johnny is jailed for the crime. Kitty, her father Andy Tracy, and waterfront-priest Father Cameron believe Johnny is innocent but all evidence points to his guilt.

Jim Conway, who works on a South American rubber plantation, leaves to meet a girl from the United States whom he is to marry. But he receives a telegram from her telling him she has married someone else. He goes to a waterfront café where he meets a singer, Joan Madison, and tells her his troubles. He asks her to marry him and return to the plantation with him using the name of the girl he was to marry. This strikes her as a great idea as she is a wanted fugitive.

Kay Arnold is a gold digger who wanders from party to party with the intention of catching a rich suitor. Jerry Strong is a young man from a wealthy family who strives to succeed as an artist. What begins as a relationship of mutual convenience soon turns into something else.

Doc, who has just moved to Cannery Row, realizes that the only entertainment is the brothel. There he meets the spunky Suzy and they fall in love, giving them both a renewed chance at life.