I've always been slightly aware of what a shadow this film casts over the 20th century movie firmament. At the very least it's been referenced a couple of times in other movies, like when it was the question John Turturro's character threw on purpose in Quiz Show, getting it wrong despite it being his favourite movie.

Here's what I imagine the film did in the popular consciousness. It was 1955, and movies were still about square-jawed hero types from the world of Westerns. Suddenly here was a character study as quiet as it was searing from a blazing hot screenwriter (or one who'd go on to be so) in Paddy Chayefsky, showing audiences something they'd never seen before on the big screen; themselves – in this case Marty (Ernest Borgnine), a dumpy, frumpy butcher who has a good heart but is nobody's idea of movie star-handsome.

He lives with his doting mother, works in a butcher shop in Manhattan, meets his buddy Angie at their favourite bar for drinks while figuring out what two bachelors are going to do a Saturday night and goes about his life.

Knowing full well he's no oil painting, and having been let down romantically time and time again, Marty is under no illusions about his prospects for finding a girl, and he's more or less given up on love.

But on the fateful night the story opens, he agrees to go to a popular dance hall for the heck of it. There he meets Clara (Betsy Blair), a woman who's let down by the guy she's with when he dumps her for an old flame and who could be Marty's female equivalent – good hearted and honest but no pinup.

They cross paths and spend the rest of the night together, dancing, talking, laughing, going to a diner after the dance, neither wanting the night to end. Marty tells her his hopes and fears – of being a perpetual bachelor, his opportunity to buy the store he works at and assure his future and more.

There's a subplot about Marty's brother and his wife being driven mad by the elderly Aunt who lives with them and the effort to move her to Marty and his mother's place. It didn't have a real lot to do with Marty's plight but it did put flesh on the bones of the family dynamic he lives in.

It's a sweet natured fable about how we all deserve love, and while stories about 'real' people have been in the aesthetic and approach of cinema for decades now, you can see how this would have been something slightly groundbreaking back in the 50s.