GC Film Series - Spring 2001
Marty ('55)
Marty is a lonely butcher approaching middle-age. His Italian mother is incessantly hounding him
to get married, but Marty insists, "whatever it is women like, I ain't got it." One night, Marty
meets a female schoolteacher with whom he finds a lot in common, and they pursue a relationship,
despite pressure from others and their own insecurities.
NOTE: If you do not wish to have certain elements of the plot revealed, please wait to read these until after you have seen the film!
I. [From The Films of the Fifties by Douglas Brode (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1976)]:
“What do you wanna do tonight, Marty? “I don’t know, Angie. What do you wanna do?” That simple exchange of dialogue quickly became one of the most quoted of the decade, and established a new school of motion pictures dealing with the ordinary problems of simple people. They came to be called “clothesline dramas,” an industry term for stories centering around what one housewife says to another while hanging up the afternoon wash. Such films also provided a new way for the motion picture industry to adjust to television. Instead of criticizing the new threat or instigating gimmicks like 3-D and Ciner-ama, producers discovered that television could provide as important a source of material as popular novels and Broad-way plays had traditionally furnished. The live television playhouses served as a testing ground for new writers like Reginald Rose and Rod Serling: film people could pick and choose among the hundreds of plays presented in any one season, buying the rights to the very best ones for future projects. Marty was one of the first, and by far the most commercially and artistically successful, of all such TV-to-film adaptations. Originally presented on the highly respected “Playhouse 90,” Paddy Chayefsky’s drama did undergo some serious re-visions en route to the big screen. Most notably, the Jewish butcher portrayed on TV by Rod Steiger was turned into an Italian, for no better reason than that Italian Americans constitute a significantly larger minority group (and thus a possibly larger paying audience) than Jewish Americans. Despite such purely commercial concessions, no one could deny the picture’s simple, sincere power. Like Rebel Without a Cause, Marty obeys a classical sense of the unities of time and place in telling a love story about two lonely people. But whereas Rebel offered a pair of at-tractive, romantic youngsters, Marty focused on a fat man (Ernest Borgnine) who meets a homely woman (Betsy Blair) but must overcome the well-meaning advice of his family and friends who believe he deserves better. The climaxes with his eventual rejection of their sentimental no-tions about him, and his courageous self-realization that woman his pals call a “dog” and whom his mother (Esther Minciotti) rejects for not being Italian, is the best thing that’s ever happened to him. In the final sequence he wrenches free of their influence and calls her for a second date; jubilant about his personal victory, the inarticulate man walks out onto the street and expresses his happiness by slamming a “STOP” sign with his fist. Significantly, the woman’s loneliness is depicted by a shot of her listlessly watching “The Ed Sullivan Show” on tele-vision—filmmakers could not resist a subtle potshot at -competition. But most of Chayefsky’s perceptive observations of what life is really like for ordinary people were retained, including a warmly comic sequence in which Marty and his buddies discuss their favorite “intellectual” Mickey Spillane. As they fondly recall their favorite blood and-guts passages, which sound absurd from the descriptions, one of the guys continually asserts: “Boy, he sure can write!" The New York locations gave the film a corre-sponding visual authenticity. By mid-decade, styles in film had become polarized. medium-budget productions all but died out, giving way wide-screen stereophonic-sound spectaculars on the one hand, and small-screen black-and-white ninety minute kitchen-sink dramas on the other. Marty epitomized this trend. Yet it was one of those films that “almost didn’t get made”: some producers at United Artists were positive no-body would go see a movie about an overweight and bald-ing Bronx butcher. The picture’s unexpected commercial success caused all the major studios to carefully scrutinize the high-quality TV anthologies; and dozens of other adap-tations followed. But none enjoyed the success of Marty. Too often, oversized budgets drowned the essentially small stories in production values and actually detracted from the human interest drama that had been so effective on the smaller home screen.
II. [From Brian Koller (http://briankoller.epinions.com)]:
Marty began life as a teleplay in 1953, starring Rod Steiger and broadcast on NBC as a Goodyear Television Playhouse production. The play apparently caught the attention of movie star Burt Lancaster, who at the time was also a partner in a film production company. Paddy Chayefsky was enlisted to adapt his own screenplay, while Delbert Mann returned as director. Ernest Borgnine, who had a memorable supporting role with Lancaster in From Here to Eternity, was cast for the lead. It would prove to be the best role of Borgnine's career. Although he never had trouble finding work, he usually played a sadistic bully or a clumsy comic relief character. Marty offered him the rare opportunity to be the dramatic lead, as well as providing him with perhaps the best script of any of his films. Marty (Borgnine) is a burly man in his mid-thirties. He is still a bachelor, and lives alone with his widowed mother. All his many brothers and sisters are married, but Marty has no prospects. He thinks of himself as being fat, ugly, and a 'dog', with his sensitive and gentle disposition seemingly only making his romantic encounters more painful and difficult. Somehow, Marty meets a spinster schoolteacher (Betsy Blair) with whom he has much in common. They are both shy, depressive, and lonely, but can find in each other the esteem that they lack in their own selves. Marty is surprised when both friends and family reject his new girlfriend, based solely on self-interest and petty observations. Marty is unusual in its unromanticized attitudes towards family, friends and religion, none of which can provide comfort for Marty. His only hope for happiness can come from romantic love, which can only be provided by a woman who is equally unhappy and 'unattractive'. Marty is surrounded by shallow, loser friends like Angie (Joe Mantell), who in their own way are as clinging as Marty's defensive, widowed mother (Esther Minciotti). Marty's sister Virginia (Karen Steele) struggles in an unhappy marriage with Tommy (Jerry Paris), with both the troublemaking mother-in-law (Augusta Ciolli) and the infant depicted as burdens rather than blessings. Catholicism does not come off well, either. Just to consider suicide is a sin, while the obligation of attending Sunday Mass leads to much family discord. Chayefsky delights in savaging Mickey Spillane. The script's repeated mention of him as a 'great writer' is reminiscent of the famous speech from Julius Caesar (1952), which had Marlon Brando as Antony referring to Brutus with increasing sarcasm as an 'honorable man'. Chayefsky manages to rip Spillane for his redundant potboiler plots and stereotyped female characters, without losing his sense of humor. Marty dominated the 1955 Academy Awards, winning Best Picture, Best Actor (Borgnine), Best Director (Delbert Mann), and Best Writing (Chayefsky). It also received nominations for Best Supporting Actor (Joe Mantell) and Actress (Betsy Blair), Best Cinematography (Joseph La Shelle), and Best Art Direction. Surprisingly, Marty received as much acclaim overseas as it did in America. At the British Academy Awards, it won Best Film, while Borgnine and Blair swept Best Foreign Actor and Actress. It even won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, the first time ever for a Best Picture Oscar winner. One has to wonder how well the film would have been received had Clara been played by a woman who was actually unattractive, or if it had ended with Marty forgetting Clara while going bar hopping with his friends. However, such a cynical and heartless ending would not have been in keeping with Marty's character. He is a man of integrity who is certain to fulfill his promise to Clara.
GC Film Series - Spring 2001
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