Marty

Marty (Delbert Mann, 1955) It was a strange dichotomy—the motion picture studios were fighting off the insurgency of television sets into American house-holds, competing against it by offering exotic locations, widescreen aspect ratios and other innovations like 3-D and stereophonic sound (we won't even get into what William Castle was doing!), even air-conditioning, in an attempt to get people off their convenient couches and away from the primitive flickering black and white images on their square TV sets and back into theaters for their distractions. At the same time, writers and other craftsmen were finding work in the nascent television field where home-grown stories with a less spectacular dimension requirement could be produced quickly and with less studio interference (for them, sponsors were the problem).

 

Marty began as a television play broadcast in 1953 on The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse, starring Rod Steiger in the titular role. Movie rights were bought up by the Hecht-Lancaster Production company (formed by Burt Lancaster and his agent Harold Hecht) and it was their first project without Lancaster starring. Steiger bowed out, not wanting to be tied to a multi-picture contract to Hecht-Lancaster and the part went to an unlikely candidate, Ernest Borgnine, with whom Lancaster had worked on From Here to Eternity and Vera Cruz, and who had just finished filming Bad Day at Black Rock. The casting couldn't have been more against "type"—Borgnine was usually being cast as heavies, bullies, villains, or even (in From Here to Eternity) a downright sadist.

But, Marty was different. Marty Piletti (Ernest Borgnine) is an approaching-middle-age butcher (he's 35) in the Bronx. He makes an okay living—he gets by, has some money saved and could see himself buying his own place—but still lives with his mother (Esther Minciotti) for the usual reasons: Dad's gone, Mom's living alone (except for him), she's a bit of a noodge, and he has a severe failure to launch.

Not that he doesn't want to. He's just not the sort of man who attracts attention. "I gotta admit, whatever it is women like, I ain't got it!" He's a butcher, fercryinoutloud, he doesn't even get any respect from his customers who don't even expect a thumb on the scale when they tell him he "oughta be ashamed of himself" for not being married when his younger siblings got married long ago. He's a nice guy. But "an ugly, fat" nice guy. And "time goes on, boy" and the years pile up and before you know it, you haven't done nothing.

But, what do you expect when the weekend comes and you end up with the same crowd on the same street-corner and you say the same thing over and over again like a mantra (but a mantra that doesn't DO anything): "Whadaya wanna do tonight, Marty?" "I dunno, Anj' (Joe Mantell), whadda YOU wanna do?" His contemporary pals are basically running in place, not going forward with their lives for fear of rejection or just plain lethargy. You develop a hard skin, like an antipathy towards women, or, worse, an antipathy towards yourself. Why have your worst faults thrown in your face again and again? Why have it proven again that you don't measure up? Why get your hopes up only to have them dashed? Why risk the pain? Better to just drift with what you're used to. It may be boring, and it may even be irritating, but it's comfortable.

Marty is a movie about being alone in a city of millions, where the opposite of love isn't hate—it's indifference. People collide into each other and don't even notice the collision. But, the next day they'll notice the bruise and wonder where that came from. It's intimate. It knows people. And it recognizes how you can want the best AND the worst for someone, if it comes out a little bit in your favor. There's something a little sweet and a lot of sour about it.

There's a lot of irony there. But, the big irony is that it wasn't something in widescreen Vistavision and Hi-Fidelity sound. It wasn't even in color, but the same black-and-white you'd find on your humming television set back home (and it was in Academy ratio too, which is what the TV tube was).

And the biggest irony is that this product of television—that looked a lot like television—won The Best Picture Oscar for its year (and the Palme D'Or at Cannes!) over the movies that were being put out to compete with television. And Best Actor. And Best Screenplay. And Best Director.

 

Writer Paddy Chayevsky must have had a good laugh at that. The heads of the studios probably didn't get the joke.

All Night Long (1962)

All Night Long (Basil Dearden, 1962) I've been watching a lot of Basil Dearden movies lately—the only ones already on the site, reviewed, are Khartoum and a horror anthology he'd participated early on in his career, Dead of Night—and they're pulpy but intelligently produced with an underlying social concern, interestingly framed, and with a sometimes perverse energy designed to take the audience slightly to the edge of their seats. They're at least designed to produce a nervous tick in the leg.

All Night Long, though, is more designed to keep a steady beat of foot-tapping, based as it is in the jazz idiom. In fact, for aficionado's, it's a bit of a must-see for performances by some "legends" (a much used word, but actually appropriate here), such as Charles Mingus (he gets lines to say!—"Hi, thanks for inviting me!"), Dave Brubeck, John Scott, John Dankworth, Tubby Hayes, Bert Courtley and Keith Christie. That's a great joy to the film, but I imagine it's frustrating for the very people who would want to see this for that purpose because it has a story and actors who distract from the performances and from the music for whole minutes at a time (I imagine that the first frenetic Beatles fans were frustrated with A Hard Day's Night for that same reason). On the other hand, for those folks into narrative in their films, they might be stymied by the story being stopped dead by performance drops. These people have never heard of or seen musicals.

The story is basically the story of Othello brought up to a jazz-beat (a bit uncomfortably) and a jazz-idiom. Entrepreneur and impresario Rod Hamilton (Richard Attenborough) goes to his club where he has prepared a very special night—a party celebrating the first anniversary of jazz King and Queen Aurelius Rex (Paul Harris) and wife Delia Lane (Marti Stevens), jazz pianist and songstress (retired), respectively. Guests are band-mates, acquaintances, and some notables in the industry and Hamilton has designed it to be a night of celebration and song for the happy couple. He should have checked the guest-list.

Brubeck and Scott and Dankworth are fine, of course—they're providing music. But along with Aurelius' inner-circle of Cass Michaels (Keith Michell) and his girl Benny (Maria Velasco), there is also drummer Johnny Cousin (Patrick McGoohan) and his wife, Emily (Betsy Blair). Cass is Aurelius' manager and completely loyal to him and a confidante to Delia. That relationship will become critical to the machinations of Cousin, who has been promised a side-deal for his own band by another manager, but only if he can persuade Delia to come out of retirement and join his band as vocalist. If he is to have any chance at success, he must drive a wedge into the happy marriage between Aurelius and Delia before she could even entertain fronting his group. And for that, he works on Cass.

He needs in-for-ma-tion. So, he invites Aurelius' manager to a private meeting on an outside landing and cozies up to Cass (who's been clean and on the straight and narrow for years and a dependable business partner) and plies him with some reefer, relaxing Cass enough to give Johnny inside intel on any weaknesses in the Rex-Lane marriage, which is (for him) disappointingly stable. But, he knows that Cass and Delia are close, so he devises a plan to make Aurelius suspect that the two are actually closer than her husband suspects. So, Johnny does a solo performance with everybody at the party, sewing doubts and intrigues and creating tensions where there are none.

It becomes apparent that Johnny Cousin is Shakespeare's Iago (and Cass is Cassio, which is not much of a name-stretch). But, where the bard's version goes through the play without any rationalization or motive for his actions (other than "I hate the Moor"), Johnny is totally and completely about getting his "gig" and, if a little chicanery and a marriage-split will advance it, then so be it. Suspicions are communicated between parties (at the party), but that can only go so far. And Johnny has a technological ally for fabricating proof.

Hamilton is a huge jazz fan, and part of his plans are to record a couple of sessions using a tape recorder (an EMI TR90 for you gear-heads), which Johnny uses to make recordings of some conversation. With that, he can take desired bits of conversation, and record his own voice for insinuating connections between the juicy bits to make it all seem like there's an affair going on between Delia and Cass to inflame Aurelius' jealousy. Anybody who's tinkered with tape will know that such an operation takes split-second timing (lest you erase the original) and you've got to have a stop-watch handy to be able to do it without editing—and in those days, you'd need a razor blade and tape, which is pretty obvious evidence of tampering. But, Johnny must be very good because his evidence doesn't even contain any electronic evidence that a tape has been started or stopped.

Technical quibbles aside, his gambit works—at least for a little while—and there is a real danger that he might get away with it, but not with the results he might want (this is based on "Othello," after all). There will be distrust and dust-up's, enough to ruin any high-class party, and certainly enough to interrupt any of the jazz interludes that pop up for the aficionado's. 

It is a thrill to watch Mingus and Brubeck jam in one of the pieces, particularly to watch the effortless fingering on strings and keyboard. That comes early on in the film, but there's enough good material throughout to keep folks who just came for the music to enjoy. And stick around: McGoohan learned to play drums for the film and he has a frenetic solo towards the end that looks damned convincing, even if—as I suspect—he's just playing to a tracked music piece. He's an intense actor—around this time, he was right in the middle of doing the "Danger Man" series (it played in the U.S. as "Secret Agent" with a Johnny Rivers title song)—and the same intensity is born out in that solo.

This came out in 1962—1963 in America—and at that time, what was called "mixed marriages" were illegal in one-third of the States. It was an issue here and might have had a hand in the film's limited distribution and it's somewhat rare availability. It is refreshingly not an issue in this British-based film where nothing—absolutely nothing—is made of it. It's not even mentioned, other than the marriage is one for celebration...and strong enough not to be rent asunder by the conniving of an ambitious narcissist. 

Another aspect that might have been controversial in the States is the on-camera portrayal of marijuana use. Even though the Hayes Code was dying of purposeful neglect during this period of film-making, drug use and distribution was prohibited under its strictures. Come to think of it, so was "mixed race" relationships. Something to consider while you're "bogarting" and considering the ash-bin of History and how time inevitably leaves prejudice there.

For whatever reason you come to it, for the music, or for the Shakespeare link, or you're a McGoohan fan/completist (or Attenborough...or Betsy Blair...or whoever), or if you're looking at the films when Dearden was telegraphing social messages and conspicuously pushing the barriers of what got on film—as Preminger was trying to do in the States—you come away with respect for this little doorway in the alleyway of film-noir sticking its neck out that although the world can be a nasty place, it's lit by the idea that the important things are devotion. And trust. 

And all that jazz.