MARTY (1955) B/W 91m dir: Delbert Mann

w/Ernest Borgnine, Betsy Blair, Esther Minciotti, Augusta Ciolli, Joe Mantell, Karen Steele, Jerry Paris, Frank Sutton, Walter Kelley, Robin Morse, Ed Sullivan

Borgnine is terrific as a plain Bronx butcher who forces himself to go out and socialize after he's consigned himself to a life of loneliness.

From The Movie Guide: "MARTY, coming in the mid-1950s, in an era of epics and extravagant films designed to stifle upstart television, was all the more startling in that it was a movie expanded from an original television drama (with Rod Steiger in the lead), written brilliantly by [Paddy] Chayefsky, one of the leaders of what came to be known as 'kitchen sink' or 'clothesline' dramas. ...

"Before doing this film Borgnine was nothing more than an uninteresting heavy. But here he showed the world the great depths of his own character. Mantell also gives a solid performance as the pal addicted to the more bloody passages of Mickey Spillane, constantly asserting: 'Boy, he sure can write.' Blair is less effective, and Minciotti is not much more than a prop mother. UA executives were not enthusiastic about the production and almost canceled the movie; they, along with the rest of Hollywood's elite, were amazed at the movie's universal success, and MARTY soon set a trend toward the small-budgeted, prosaic films to come."

From the British Film Institute journal Sight & Sound, this contemporary review of the film by Penelope Houston:

"The television writer, the playwright who thinks in terms of the small screen and its potentialities, is still a comparative newcomer. Not the least interesting aspect of Marty (United Artists), the outsider which walked away with the Grand Prix at the Cannes Festival, is its suggestion of what this type of writer may be able to bring to the cinema, as well as to his chosen medium, at a time when Hollywood's pursuit of the outsize and the ornate seems to carry it steadily further away from the human personality. Paddy Chayefsky, who acted as associate producer on Marty and adapted his own television original for the screen, has described his intentions in writing the play: to catch the characters 'in an untouched moment of life'; to write the dialogue 'as if it had been wire-tapped'; to explore that 'world of the mundane, the ordinary and the untheatrical' which, he argues, should be television's particular province. Marty, his commonplace hero, belongs to the Italian-American district of the Bronx; he works in a butcher's shop, is a little ashamed of his job, and has been made painfully aware by a series of rebuffs and disappointments of his own lack of polish and good looks. At a dance hall, he takes pity on a girl as plain, lonely and unconfident as himself. Afraid that his friends will laugh at his unprepossessing choice he hesitates, unwilling to acknowledge his own feelings, before admitting to them, and to himself, that he is in love.

"The film's emphasis is on loneliness in the city: the bored aimlessness of the young men hanging about the bars and street corners, the unhappiness of the widow whose children no longer need her, the fear that attacks Marty's mother when she realises what his marriage may mean in terms of her own life, and the despairing anxiety for affection that brings Marty and the girl together. The writing accurately catches the tone of everyday life, with its hesitations and uncertainties, its moments of involuntary drama and unexpected emotion. The sharp and detailed script, though, has none of that artless improvised quality which Chayefsky's statement of his own purposes might suggest. Intermittently, the dialogue recalls that of Saroyan in a play such as The Time of Your Life: there is the same sense of characters thinking aloud, cut off from each other by their own preoccupations, so that human communication appears in itself a sufficiently difficult and chancy business. There is nothing casual about this kind of writing; and the contrast between the validity of the scene in which Marty's friends knowledgeably discuss the novels of Mickey Spillane, and the snatch of overheard dialogue between two women in a bar which has the air of a deliberate piece of writing for effect, indicates the care with which the 'wire tapper' must organise and discipline his material.

"Marty, in detail a study of life in the Bronx, is in essence a contemporary love story, a romantic encounter developed with charm, humour and emotional penetration. Ernest Borgnine, breaking away from the succession of thug parts which began with his chillingly brutal stockade sergeant in From Here to Eternity, plays Marty with an expansiveness and warmth of feeling which underline his vulnerability; it is precisely in his kindly good humour, his capacity for friendship, that Marty is open to attack. Betsy Blair, an actress seen too infrequently on the screen, has perhaps the more complex part: withdrawn, tense, afraid of life and in retreat from it, the girl might well appear altogether too forlorn and woe-begone. But the performance has an integrity which invites sympathy while avoiding the easy appeal for pity. Marty's character is built up, as it were, in clear statements, the girl's in asides; it is this quality of hesitant, inarticulate tenderness that Betsy Blair's playing notably conveys.

"The director, Delbert Mann, staged the play first on television and his treatment reflects a closely sympathetic response to the author's intentions. The close-up technique, the adroit balancing of major and minor parts, the unstressed authenticity of the backgrounds, of the city streets at night, the neighbourhood bars and cafes, the crowded Saturday night dance hall, all work towards the film's particular atmosphere of intimate observation. If the direction can be faulted, it is in the generally rather cautious and tentative approach to the resources of the larger screen. Marty, though, remains primarily a writer's film and one in which an 'offbeat' theme has been compromised by none of the familiar concessions; the Hecht-Lancaster production team are to be congratulated on this unusual state of affairs."

MARTY won four Oscars: Best Picture, Director, Actor (Borgnine), and Adapted Screenplay (Chayefsky, based on his television play). It was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Mantell), Supporting Actress (Blair), Cinematography (Joseph LaShelle), and Art Direction (Edward S. Haworth, Walter Simonds, Robert Priestley).