Everybody and their mother has already written more than I could hope to say about this movie. So I will keep it short. But one like this begs the question: a movie so frequently watched, so hyped, so dissected, so thoroughly turned inside out over the years by lovers of movies; why do we keep coming back to these classics? Why do we love them? Why do they resonate across the decades?

The answer here is simple: Brando. The script is not too shabby, though the ultimate struggle is resolved in a fairly dated way. It is for similar reasons that Budd Schulberg is not too widely read today: that kind of overwrought, left-leaning, “I’m in tune with the common man” preening was never going to stand the test of time. The shot of the dock workers lined up, near the end, doing for Brando’s Terry Malloy through numbers what they didn’t dare do individually, the power of the people coming face to face with the overwhelmed wheelings and dealings of the “the man” reminded me a lot of the “solidarity and brotherhood” shots in an old Eisenstein film. (Think Battleship Potemkin.) It is powerful for the same reasons, but also horribly dated.