NR | 1h 30m | Drama | 1955
Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky first wrote his TV play “Marty” with friend Martin Ritt in mind as the protagonist. Eventually, Rod Steiger played Marty on TV. Ernest Borgnine played him in the film adaptation.
In the film, amiable 34-year-old bachelor Marty Piletti (Borgnine) lives in the Bronx, running a butcher shop, caring for his mom Teresa (Esther Minciotti), and lazing around with his bored-boring bachelor buddies. He smiles, and sometimes frowns, away well-meaning taunts that he’s the only man in his family who at that age is still single. In that intimate world, everyone is in everyone else’s life. And no one minds.
Marty figures that he’s too fat and ugly to land a good wife: “Whatever it is that women like, I ain’t got it.” Then, a chance meeting with Clara Snyder (Betsy Blair), a 29-year-old Brooklyn schoolteacher, changes that. She, too, believes that being dumped by dates is inevitable, given how plain she looks. But Marty befriends her, even after she’s dumped at a ballroom dance. Then, they walk and talk and, tentatively, warm to each other’s kindness. Together, they savor Marty’s diagnosis of their reticence: “If you get kicked around long enough, you get to be a professor of pain.”
Marty promises to call soon, so they can see a movie together. To Clara, accustomed to rejection, turning up for the movie date will be proof that he’s serious. She waits. But for all their nagging him about marrying before it’s too late, Marty’s mom and buddies complain that Clara’s not good enough for him. He’d been meaning to call her. Now, he’s having second thoughts.
Neither Borgnine nor Blair had marquee good looks, and Delbert Mann, in his debut as a feature film director, used that to universalize their ordinariness. His low-key film won four of its eight Oscar nominations—Best Actor, Director, Screenplay, and Best Picture—and the Palme d'Or at Cannes.
Screen toughie Borgnine won his only Oscar playing a softie. Blair, who’d lobbied for this unglamorous role, won Best Actress at Cannes and a Best Actress Oscar nomination.
From Courtship to Companionship
Marty’s buddies are not the woman-haters they pretend to be, despite their fondness for writer Mickey Spillane and his maladjusted male characters. They’re the ones at dance halls popping the question to a new woman each Saturday night, “Care to dance?” They’re the ones swallowing manly pride, licking wounds of ridicule, hoping that one of the girls they dance with will become the woman they marry. They’re the ones approaching women with trepidation, trying to conjure respectable retorts to imagined insults.
Chayefsky sets marriage above and apart from other bonds that need boundaries the way a garden plant needs its pot to grow. Watch how Marty gently, but firmly, closes a phone-booth door in his friend’s face to define a boundary that he otherwise struggles to hold. Chayefsky is saying that boundaries preserve rather than destroy special relationships. If anything, the lack of boundaries takes special people, and the respect they call for, for granted.
Yes, many women fall for looks, money, and status. But some, like Clara, merely want an intelligent, decent, and sensitive man.
Sure, many men fall for superficialities. But some, like Marty, just want a likable woman.
At their first dance, Marty says: “You know, ... two people get married, and they’re gonna live together 40 or 50 years. It’s gotta be more than whether they’re good lookin’ or not.” He wants a lifelong bond, not a fling. Normally quiet, he can’t help regaling her with stories about his family, his boyhood, his youth, and his time in the Army. He makes her smile, laugh, and want to wear makeup.
As they walk through the Bronx, without realizing it, they create an invisible bubble around them, making them immune to passersby. Others might smirk that love is blind. What could he possibly see in her, or she in him? But Marty and Clara know the truth. Love is not blind; it’s supersighted. They see what others cannot. Bust the bubble, and you blur their vision of each other.
