Review of Marty (1955) by Miguel S — 10 Jan 2011

Never have I understood the fascination with "Marty", a simple, low-budget story with a thin humane storyline and without much cinematic interest, which won both the Oscar for Best Picture and the Palm D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

True that in that year the nominees for the Oscar where also not that great, but even so, I guess this is probably one of the worst to ever win. I can only explain it as a fad (enhanced by the publicity, which supposedly cost more than the movie itself), and a social need at that particular time for such a movie, the same way that "Slumdog Millionaire" was widely well received, due to the need for uplifting material on the verge of a world crisis.

In any other occasion, neither Slumdog or Marty would have been much noticed. Based on a play and a TV film of a few years before, and with 85 minutes of running time (the shortest ever Best Picture Oscar winner), Marty has a plot that can be explained in two lines.

Ernest Borgnine plays to perfection a 34 year old single man, shy and awkward, who works at a butcher shop, and at night just hangs out with low down beaten friends at bars or stays at the house with his mother.

While everyone else has girls and gets married, Marty stays single and lonely, tired of the pressures of his mother to find a girl, and of his friends who are always seeking a new easy adventure. One day he meets his female self, a shy school teacher played by Betsy Blair.

They have a terrific time because they are made for each other, both kind and simple souls, who have always been left on the margins by the others. Their innocent time together takes most of the time of the picture, during that single night.

He promises to call her the next day, but his mother and friends don't like her, for different reasons, and he puts off calling her, until 10 minutes of film latter, at that very night, when he finally does, and the movie ends there.

Aside from a subplot about Marty's aunt this is it. This is a movie which will hardly appeal to anyone who is not shy, nor has ever had a difficulty in finding a relationship, nor has ever understood what it is to be lonely.

It is also a movie which will hardly appeal to anyone under the age of 30, and to very few of those who have beyond that but have had a series of relationships. It is a movie for the lonely spirits, a movie of a decaying hope, and a movie whose ultimate message, that every man can find his soulmate despite everything and everyone, is given in a straighforward way without any drama nor cinematic embelishments.

Maybe this sort of social cinema, "true cinema", true to life, was the reasons why the critics liked it. There are other examples of other movies all striped of the Hollywood essence that have worked.

But not, in my opinion, "Marty". Doing a film in a certain way does not mean it is immediately part of that way. Here we have a gentle mother who wants the son to get married but changes her mind at the moment she fears to be left alone (hence the aunt plot to make it believable- and also to fill the picture).

We have a man whose "dilemma" is solved in less than half a day. We have got a woman whose only inkling of a personality is a 15 second scene where she is crying because Marty hasn't called her yet.

"Marty" isn't build enough to be true powerful cinema, even in its simplicity (simple can be powerful, but not here). Marty meets a girl one night, turns his life around, next morning he goes to church, next afternoon his friends and mother persuade him not to call her, 2 hours later he changes his mind and calls her.

The movie does not even give us the call, it ends as he is dialing, and forces us to believe that everything will turn out all right. What if the girl was so sad that she refuses to see him again? What if they go out again and it doesn't work out? What if.

.. a million things... A movie that hails to be so true to life, so insightfully social, then ends in a Hollywoodesque way. Who will it uplift? Perhaps the lonely and sad ones. And maybe not even those.

For all these reasons I don't think that "Marty" works. It can be simple and pure. But it does not have the necessary bulk to be a film, and its thread is too thin, even more so at the end.

Of its 4 Oscars (Picture, Director, Actor and Screenplay), I can only agree with the acting, and I totally disagree with the screenplay. And by the way, what horrible Italian accents his mother and aunt have.

..