By Dana Polan
Quite often in Marty,
from 1955, there are long takes (some multiple minutes long) that calmly
observe the anodyne activities and interactions of the little people that the
film takes as its subject matter. It might be tempting to think of such shots
as theatrical – although the film adapts a teleplay (by Paddy Chayevsky,
a key writer in what is often thought of as television’s Golden Age of live
drama) and not a piece of theatre per se. Yet while some of the shots of the
film are static, none approximate the perspective of an imagined audience at
the theater and many are about characters moving quietly through space as the
camera glides along with them. This is a resonant form of cinematic
storytelling in its own right.
In an historical moment
where Hollywood was turning often to splashy and spectacular films (what the
self-congratulatory musical Silk Stockings extolls as “Glorious
Technicolor, Breathtaking CinemaScope and Stereophonic Sound”) to challenge the
easy domesticity of television viewership, Marty took a different path:
it tried to rival the small-screen by showing that Hollywood could make little
pictures (little in narrative ambition, that is, and unassuming visual style) that
might outdo television at its own game by re-making television’s own offerings.
Marty tells
of a Queens butcher (Borgnine) who is desperate for love but blocked by
insecurity, low self-regard around his looks and bodily frame (he’s quite
stocky), and by his own internalization of the macho codes of the dead-end guys
he hangs out with. When he meets plain schoolteacher Clara (Betsy Blair) at a
dance hall, the two seeming losers at life find they share a soft suffering at
love’s misfortunes and they hit it off through an evening of walking and
talking and furtively reaching out to each other. Ironically, the friends and
family who have encouraged Marty to find the right woman and get married
realize that his new-found romance could actually take him away from them, and
they try to paint the worst possible picture of Clara. The last section of the
film revolves around Marty’s torment as he is tempted to give in to the
pressures of the locals he’s known so long (his mom, his buddies at the bar)
but also realizes that loving Clara may be his only real shot at happiness, self-respect,
and emotional growth.
Marty was
only one of set of films that cinematically opened up a prior teleplay for the
big screen but it became the most acclaimed, winning the first ever Palme d’Or
at the Cannes Film Festival and then the Oscar for Best Picture (along with
Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Screenplay, the latter in a moment where
there wasn’t a distinction between Original and Adapted so that Chayefsky could
win for a reworking of his teleplay). It is perhaps worth noting that the Oscar
for Best Picture the following year went to the big-cast, multiple
location epic Around the World in Eighty Days – Hollywood thereby
returning to business as usual. But Marty helped legitimate a tradition
of intimate dramas that, as entertainment journalists Bryan Reesman and Max
Evry note in their well-researched and wide-ranging commentary track for the
Blu-ray of Marty, led to the low-budget indie tales of recent decades.
(The commentators are particularly good at noting Marty’s direct
influence on the Baltimore working class narratives of Barry Levinson.)
Reesman and Evry make
continued reference to the celebrated TV version of Marty from 1953
where the key roles were played by Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand, and it’s too
bad this Blu-ray edition of the film couldn’t have included the earlier
teleplay. (Maybe there were licensing issues?) The only added Marty features
in fact are a trailer for the film (along with other of the intimate films made
from teleplays) and the commentary track. The latter is quite rich in insights
– about similar small dramas of the time, about European influences on working
class Hollywood realism, about the writer and director and the actors, and so
on. At times perhaps, the very capaciousness of the commentary means that the
film itself can get left behind. But Marty is itself emotionally
resonant enough to stand on its own as one watches this very key film of the
1950s.
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(Dana Polan is the author of "Dreams of Flight: 'The Great Escape' in American Film and Culture". Click here to order from Amazon