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.

So there is contradiction there, tension, behind the scenes irony. Kazan (the figurehead of scab-rat McCarthy-era Hollywood cheese-eaters) making a movie that echoes great propaganda pieces of the early Soviet era. But tension – the whole range of human contradiction – is precisely why the movie as a whole keeps bringing us back. Because it is so thoroughly encapsulated in Brando’s mercurial performance as the prematurely washed-up, “I could have been a contendah,” ex-boxer Terry Malloy.

Indeed, all of this is captured brilliantly even within that one infamous scene (and if you’ve never seen it before, you’ll probably be surprised at how much of it you already know; it had me walking around for the rest of the day saying “It wahz you, Chahlie” at random intervals). Love, defiance, anger, depression, idle dreaming – within the span of a few short minutes, Brando moves seamlessly back and forth between them, in both word and expression, and the scene (aside from showing off pure acting chops) sits as a microcosm for the full range of tensions at work across the length of the movie.

If you have not seen it, watch it. If you have, watch it again. It is emotional, it is tragic, it is sometimes silly, and there is a reason (or ten) why it is so famous.