Marty

I had watched this movie before but when it appeared on TCM recently I recorded it and watched it again. It was and is a great movie. Ernest Borgnine won Best Actor, Paddy Chayefsky won Best Screenplay and the movie won for Best Picture. In an era of epic movies with huge stories and scripts this was a simple character driven story.

A brief aside about Ernest Borgnine. Watching him in Red just a few weeks ago at 92, seeing him in the Wild Bunch, The Dirty Dozen and countless other movies including The Posidion Adventure it becomes clear he was a wonderful actor with significant range. Perhaps the only thing he could not do was play the traditional lead actor as he was not considered typical handsome.

In this movie he plays Marty an Italian American butcher who describes himself as " a heavyset fellow." Good natured, earnest and sincere at 34 years old he lives with his mother and is lonely. He also is tired of all of the neighbor ladies at his butcher shop advising him that he should be married as all of his younger siblings have.

After work on a Saturday night Marty goes to a dance at The Stardust ballroom and meets a schoolteacher who has been dumped by her blind date as he was looking for some more action than she would presumably give. Marty, ever the gentleman, consoles her and they dance. Eventually they go for a walk down the streets of New York and sit at a diner and talk for hours.

As many of can understand and remember when Marty tells his bachelor friends the next day of this young lady he is advised to dump her, that she is too plain, ( though Marty calls himself a little fat man) and many other dispariging things. In short misery loves company and his friends are miserable.

The movie ends well and we have hope for Marty's future. Borgnine is a wonderful actor, and has become an American treasure.

For a view of loneliness and the dreams we all have that is as relevant today as it was fifty years ago watch and enjoy this wonderful movie.