So this movie isn’t what I thought it was, mostly because I thought it was a movie based on a Tennessee Williams play, set in New Orleans where Marlon Brando yells “Stella!” But — spoiler alert — that’s a totally different thing altogether somehow.

This movie is actually about dockworkers, who I assume are on Long Island, because they call themselves longshoremen. They have a union, but the union boss is crooked, and anyone who speaks up against him gets murdered. So now we’re going to follow Marlon Brando, a not-very-bright kid who needs to decide between what’s easy and what’s right.

The beauty of the movie is that Brando isn’t a noble hero. He’s not some crusader for justice. He’s stupid, he’s lazy, he wants to go along to get along. But he can be needled into doing the right thing, even if he immediately regrets it. There’s something satisfying about seeing other characters keep trying to cast him in the role of a hero, while he keeps refusing to rise to the occasion. (And maybe director Elia Kazan — famously reviled for naming Communists — can relate to that cowardly approach to virtue.)

Still, I don’t know, it seems like a slight movie. Like, it’s shot well, it has a memorable (if waaaaaaaay too obtrusive) Leonard Bernstein score, and Brando’s acting up a storm, but end of the day, this is a movie about a corrupt union boss, and there’s just not a lot of there there. It’s not bad, it has real virtues, but Top 100 seems like a bit of a stretch.