The 1955 Best Picture winner Marty probably has something of a unique pedigree. While there have been numerous movies based on TV shows, sometimes with the original cast, Marty was based on a single episode of a TV show, an hour long live drama for The Philco Television Playhouse. Playwright Paddy Chayefsky adapted and expanded his own original script to fit a feature format, and the movie won three other Oscars beyond Best Picture, including one each for Chayefsky and lead actor Ernest Borgnine.
I actually got to see the original starring Rod Steiger in college, and I liked what I saw back then. How does the movie stack up?
Pretty well, actually. Given the choice, I may prefer the original TV version, but I saw that twenty years ago and my reasons are relatively minor all told.
The plot is about Marty Piletti (Borgnine), an Italian-American butcher in the Bronx. He’s single, but plenty of people keep asking him why he hasn’t found a girl and gotten married yet. He’s sweet, a bit lonely, and in a rut. He lives with his mother, and one night, partially on her insistence, he tries going out to a ballroom to meet a woman. Marty’s tried this before, but in the past, it never really worked out. This time, though, he overhears a fellow describing a blind date he didn’t want, and Marty being a decent human being, especially after the other guy both offered money to other men and started hitting up someone else, decides to go chat with the woman in question. Her name is Clara (Betsy Blair), and she’s considered plain. But she and Marty hit it off.
After having a wonderful night together where they mostly talked, Marty has to decide if he will honor his commitment to call her back up. No one else seems to be encouraging it. His friends think she’s not pretty enough, and his mother, fearful he’ll abandon her to live alone, discourages the relationship. But this isn’t that kind of movie, and the film ends with Marty deciding he’d rather be with a woman whose company he enjoys than anything else as he finally calls her back.
Really, this is a charming little movie. The stakes are fairly low as it only involves whether or not two people can get past outer appearances and be happy together. As it is, both are inspired to take a next step by their night out. Clara, a high school science teacher, will take a promotion to another school and move out of her parents’ house while Marty is looking into buying his boss’s shop out. Borgnine plays the character as mostly sweet, a bit of a motormouth, and a little desperate. It mostly works today aside from one scene where Marty reacts poorly to Clara pulling away from a kiss. That scene didn’t age well.
That said, I will say if Betsy Blair is considered “plain” that it must be Hollywood plain because, well, she isn’t. Then again, Borgnine’s Marty is described as “fat,” and while he isn’t slim by any stretch of the imagination, he’s likewise not that heavy all told. Then again, Nancy Marchand (AKA Tony Soprano’s mother) was the TV version’s Clara, and the TV version found a way to make her look rather severe in the face. It’s the same basic story (the two meet, have fun, and Marty calls her back in the end because he doesn’t care what she looks like so much as he has fun when he’s with her). Still, Marty is one of three movies to take Best Picture and top prize at the Cannes Film Festival (the other two are The Lost Weekend and more recently Parasite), and it’s a rather nice movie. Well worth checking out, and probably easier to find than the TV version.
Grade: A-
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