The Carbones are a working class Italian-American family living in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn - patriarch Eddie, his wife Beatrice, and their niece Catherine.

Eddie's incestuous love for his niece drives him into cruel criticism of Rodolpho, including the accusation that he is an opportunist who plans to marry Catherine only to obtain his U.S. citizenship papers.

A waterfront lawyer, Alfieri, succeeds in winning freedom for Rodolpho because of his pending marriage, but Marco is slated for deportation.

[4] A View from the Bridge premiered in the United States on January 22, 1962 by Continental Film Distributors, to generally negative reviews.

"[6] A more favorable review came from The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, who praised Sidney Lumet's realistic depiction of the Brooklyn waterfront and his choice of actors but believed that principal character Eddie Carbone lacked depth and dimension.

"The rumbling and gritty quality of the Brooklyn waterfront," he wrote, "the lofty and mercantile authority of the freight ships tied up at the docks, the cluttered and crowded oppressiveness of the living rooms of the dockside slums are caught in his camera's comprehension, to pound it into the viewer's head that this is an honest presentation of the sort of personal involvement that one might watch—might spy upon—through a telescope set on Brooklyn Bridge."