Marty

Rating

Director

Delbert Mann

Screenplay

Paddy Chayefsky

Length

91 min.

Starring

Ernest Borgnine, Betsy Blair, Esther Minciotti, Augusta Ciolli, Joe Mantell, Karen Steele, Jerry Paris

MPAA Rating

Unrated

Review

Certain to be a bachelor his whole life, one man stands up against his friends and family to find a love that was meant to be in the film Marty.

Ernest Borgnine stars as the titular hero Marty Piletti, a butcher’s assistant who hopes he won’t forever be alone. His customers, his mother and his friends all wonder when the overweight, unattractive 34-year-oldwill find a girl who’ll marry him.

Against his better judgment, he meets that girl at the Stardust Ballroom, a swanky dance hall where plenty of “tomatoes” (a term signifying a beautiful woman) go. He’s as much the wallflower as ever and waits to find a girl who might want to dance with him. When a creep walks up to him and offers him five bucks to take his date home because he’s met someone else, Marty refuses. Undaunted, the guy finds another who’ll do it. Marty witnesses the attempt to pass him off as an army buddy and the girl, Clara Snyder (Betsy Blair) leaves the room crying. Marty does what any good natured man would and rushes out to comfort the distraught woman.

What follows is a courtship that lasts the night long and leaves Marty in a position to call her after mass in the afternoon. However, when his mother and friends lay into him about how unattractive and undeserving she is of him, he begins to believe them. The rest of the day, you can see him thinking about her and their conversations and everything that’s happened in his life before he realizes what he must do.

One of the more enigmatic Best Picture selections in history, Marty is lacking a great deal of the grandeur and breadth that characterized other choices all throughout Academy history. It is also the shortest film ever to win the award coming in at a brisk 91 minutes.

That’s not to say the film isn’t good. It’s quite adroit in its examination of such traditional people. His mother (Esther Minciotti) fears what Marty will do with her should he and Clara get married thanks to a similar situation with her sister Catharine (Augusta Ciolli) who is being pushed out of her house so that her son and daughter-in-law can live in peace. It’s clear from the outset that Jewish scribe Paddy Chayefsky took some parts of his childhood and injected it into the intensely realistic dialogue herein.

It’s part of what works for the film. What doesn’t is the overwhelming feeling of “so what” you get out of the conclusion. Sure the right decisions are made and the finale is happy as it can be but director Delbert Mann doesn’t give you the emotional impact necessary to visually convey these emotions. All of that success can be attributed to the wonderful performances of Borgnine and Blair. They work incredibly well together using their characters’ similar personalities to develop a largely mirror-like quality for each.

Neither is classically attractive but their personalities keep the audience enthralled in the fate of such obviously destined lovers. Modern audiences won’t identify as easily because of the disparity now in coupling; however, the romantic will see in these two star-crossed lovers the embodiment of the hope we all have for our futures in love.

Review Written

November 8, 2006