Beaten up and beaten down, baffled Terry Malloy still yearns for redeeming love and heroic self-assertion. He achieves both in Elia Kazan’s masterpiece of American realism. A half-century later the film’s presentation of union corruption on the New Jersey docks seems a little quaint, but Brando’s ferocious and tormented yearning for Eva Marie Saint’s virginal Catholic girl will still tear your heart out.