I Cover the Waterfront is a 1933 American pre-Code romantic drama film directed by James Cruze and starring Ben Lyon, Claudette Colbert, Ernest Torrence, and Hobart Cavanaugh.

San Diego Standard reporter H. Joseph Miller (Ben Lyon) has been covering the city's seedy waterfront for the past five years and is fed up with the work.

Dogged by the lack of progress of his current assignment investigating the smuggling of Chinese into the country by a fisherman named Eli Kirk (Ernest Torrence), he longs to escape his grim life and land a newspaper job back East so he can marry his Vermont sweetheart.

One morning after wasting an entire night tracking down bad leads, his editor (Phelps) insists he investigate a report of a girl swimming naked at the beach.

To avoid being caught with evidence of his smuggling operation Kirk orders his men to wrap his illegal Chinese payload's legs in anchor chain and cast him overboard.

When Miller learns from Julie – who is still blissfully ignorant of her father's criming – that Kirk is due to dock at the Chinese settlement that night, he notifies the Coast Guard.

[11] Written by Johnny Green and Edward Heyman, the song went on to become a jazz standard recorded by many artists, including Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, The Ink Spots, and Ella Fitzgerald, among others.

[14] While Hall felt the drama was not as good as some of director James Cruze's previous work, the "clever acting of the principals"—especially that of Ernest Torrence—offset some of the film's shortcomings.

[14] Hall found some of the scenes "more shocking than suspenseful" and felt a broader adaptation of Max Miller's book may have been more interesting than the focus on the melodramatic series of incidents about a sinister fisherman.

John Mosher of The New Yorker described the adaptation as a "commonplace screen romance," but also praised the performance of the late Torrence, writing that he "was at the height of his power ... One can foresee that many pictures will be empty things for lack of him.

"[15] Variety said: "Rather than an adaption of the Max Miller book, this is a homemade studio yarn carrying the original’s title", calling it "a moderately entertaining picture ...