Oscars Retrospective: Marty (28th Academy Awards Review)
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Marty is one of the most fascinating films to have ever won the Academy Awards and I mean that in three different ways. One is because it is a great movie, two is because of how radically different it is from almost every other movie to have won the Academy Award (not to mention movies in general coming out of Hollywood at the time) and three is because of how it has one of the most hilarious production histories ever told.
But we’ll get to all that in a moment, first things first. Marty is a romantic drama centered around Marty Piletti (Ernest Borgnine), a chronically single Italian-American butcher that lives in New York City with his mother, Teresa (Esther Minciotti). Marty goes through the motions of life, going to work and bringing home the money, as his friends constantly barrage and nag him about settling down and getting married. After all, most of his friends are married as are his brothers and sisters. Why can’t he find himself a wife; it can’t be that hard, can it?
So, what’s holding him back? Is there some kind of screwball-esque misunderstanding that he keeps finding himself in? Or maybe is his mother so strict and he dotes on her so much that he wouldn’t feel comfortable bringing girls back? Well, no, it’s just that he’s been rejected so many times and he feels so ugly that he thinks that no girl could ever love him so he just doesn’t bother anymore. But, after enough badgering, he does go to a social dance and meets a high school teacher named Clara (Betsy Blair) that he starts hitting it off with. The rest of the movie is then them going on a date while Marty confronts the roots of his own low self-esteem.
What makes Marty great is how completely against type it is for what audiences have long been trained to expect from Hollywood movies. Just about every Hollywood romantic film up to this point was usually a screwball antic where the characters exist in the upper social strata of society. They’re always comfortably upper-middle class, if not flat out rich. They always speak in the generic mid-Atlantic accent of Hollywood (an accent that rich people made up to distinguish themselves; if you’ve wondered why characters in old Hollywood movies all sound the same, that’s why). And the conflict was usually coming from zany and impossible situations that no normal person would ever encounter when dealing with their relationship.
By contrast, Marty Piletti looks like a normal guy, sounds like a normal New Yorker and is dealing with problems that many people have experienced at one point or another in their lives. Marty actually feels a lot closer in themes to a lot of the Neorealist films that were coming out of Europe at the same time even though it’s still stylistically shot like a Hollywood movie. It’s hard to really articulate but most of the Italian Neorealist films have this almost documentary-esque quality where it’s shot with minimal close-ups to give an air of authenticity to it. Marty still engages in a lot of the pacing and cinematography familiar to Hollywood films and still follows the 3-act structure. But it’s dealing with a subject matter that feels a lot closer to reality.
This gives Marty a unique identity in cinematic history as it seems a combination of where cinema has been and where it was going, showing a healthy blend of these two styles. If anything, I think that Marty has a lot more in common with the French New Wave films, a full 3 years before the New Wave began with Le Beau Serge (Eng.: Handsome Serge) (1958) and Les Quartre Cents Coups (Eng.: The 400 Blows) (1959). This would do a lot to explain the film’s popularity in Europe as it ended up winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival as well as the Academy Award for Best Picture (one of only three movies to have won both). So even if Marty wasn’t a great movie (and it is), it would still be an interesting film to study as an inflection point between where cinema had been and where it was going to be in just a few years.
What made Hollywood so willing to take such a monumental risk on such an unorthodox story? Well, truth be told, they weren’t. Marty has one of the wackiest making-of stories of any movie you’ll ever hear of. It was less a passion project of someone who wanted to tell the story so much as it was a Producers-esque scam that ended up hilariously backfiring.
1954 and 1955 were pretty good years for United Artists. Too good, in fact. It turned out that having enough hits in a year means that your company’s assets actually look better to the federal government who’s going to want a bigger piece of the pie during tax season. So producer Harold Hecht crunched some numbers and realized that if they had a bomb or two, the total annual gross for United Artists would plummet and they could claim the production as a $350,000 tax write-off. (In case you’re wondering, this is not an isolated incident as Hollywood bookkeeping is notoriously crooked.) Marty was supposed to be that bomb.
The story was based on a second-run teleplay that the studio picked up for pennies. The two leads were specifically cast because they were considered ugly and Hecht figured that audiences don’t like to watch stories about ugly people falling in love. The cherry on top is that the studio’s money man would hang around on set with a rolling counter of how much money was being spent on any given day and end the day once they reached the till required for their write-off. The whole production was completed in 16 days and the movie was released on April 11th, 1955 - well away from that pesky awards season - and Hecht and his fellow producers sat back, relaxed and waited for the trades to tell them about what a flop Marty was.
Instead, Marty ended up making a lot of money via word-of-mouth, grossing over $2,000,000 at the box office (around $22.7 million today), which is a noticeably bigger number than $350,000. The film opened to rave reviews by both critics and audiences and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. As mentioned, it also received a strong second wind in Europe, increasing the film’s gross to over $3,500,000, 10 times its original budget. To my knowledge, there are no photographs of Hecht and co.’s faces when this news reached them because I would kill to see one. Trying to rig the tax system is bad enough but there’s something especially despicable about having such a shallow point of view of the world around you that you hire someone while telling them that they’re so ugly that you think their looks would cause a movie to lose money. Luckily karma won out here and United Artists got their comeuppance, courtesy of Uncle Sam and the Internal Revenue Service.
As it turned out, critics and audiences fell in love with Marty Piletti because he looked like such a normal guy. I honestly don’t even think that Borgnine and Blair are all that ugly-looking either; they just look like normal people. If you walk into any butcher shop in the outer boroughs of New York City, both back then and now, the dude behind the counter will bear a striking resemblance to Marty Piletti.
On the movie itself, Marty is very excellent. This is another one of those movies where it kinda begins and ends with the main character and Ernest Borgnine just knocks this role out of the Goddamned park (which is especially impressive considering how, again, this was a movie that was supposed to fail so no one would’ve blamed him if he didn’t bring his A-game). Borgnine was a character actor who was known for playing tough guys and villains in movies such as From Here to Eternity (1953) and Vera Cruz (1954) so this role was a nice turn of phrase for him. You really do get the sense that Marty is such a sweet guy but his chronically low self-esteem gives him trouble breaking out of his shell. The character is genuinely timeless and I think the problems he’s dealing with can still hit home for anyone who has trouble dating, even today. It’s a tact that no other movie at the time was taking and you’ll still rarely see romantic films that cut this deep today.
I especially like how the movie is just about a date: showing before, during and after. The major conflict of the last act revolves around Marty trying to overcome his shyness to call Clara for a second date. The movie keeps the focus where it needs to be and also serves as a nice time capsule of social life for young adults circa 1955.
If there is one problem with Marty, it is that Marty is admittedly more of a character study than a romantic drama. Blair’s portrayal of Clara takes the tact of her also not being as much of a looker and being painfully shy. So much so to the point that she barely speaks at all during the movie. As a result, she comes off more as a plot device for what she means to Marty than as a fully fleshed-out character that he falls in love with. It thus feels a bit distracting when we see the date and most of it is spent seeing Marty yapping up non-stop instead of feeling like a rapport between the two. Considering how big of a deal Marty makes about her, she doesn’t seem to have much to make her memorable. (In fairness, though, this does happen with some couples where one rarely speaks and the other can’t stop so… eh.)
All of the other side-characters are good, and feel New York as Hell, but not especially memorable but then again they don’t have to be. This film belongs to Borgnine. Marty Piletti is one of the essential film characters of the 1950s, being one of the first Hollywood protagonists who seems like an average guy. In a decade defined by large-octane Biblical epics and heroes fighting monsters from beyond the stars, sometimes just seeing a movie about a guy battling his own personal demons can be every bit as invigorating.
But could it be called movie of the year?
In case you missed it:
1st Academy Awards (1927/28): Wings/Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans: Part 1, Part 2
2nd Academy Awards (1928/29): The Broadway Melody: Part 1, Part 2
3rd Academy Awards (1929/30): All Quiet on the Western Front: Part 1, Part 2
4th Academy Awards (1930/31): Cimarron: Part 1, Part 2
5th Academy Awards (1931/32): Grand Hotel: Part 1, Part 2
6th Academy Awards (1932/33): Cavalcade: Part 1, Part 2
7th Academy Awards (1934): It Happened One Night: Part 1, Part 2
8th Academy Awards (1935): Mutiny on the Bounty: Part 1, Part 2
9th Academy Awards (1936): The Great Ziegfeld: Part 1, Part 2
10th Academy Awards (1937): The Life of Emile Zola: Part 1, Part 2
11th Academy Awards (1938): You Can't Take It With You: Part 1, Part 2
12th Academy Awards (1939): Gone With the Wind: Part 1, Part 2
13th Academy Awards (1940): Rebecca: Part 1, Part 2
14th Academy Awards (1941): How Green Was My Valley: Part 1, Part 2
15th Academy Awards (1942): Mrs. Miniver: Part 1, Part 2
16th Academy Awards (1943): Casablanca: Part 1, Part 2
17th Academy Awards (1944): Going My Way: Part 1, Part 2
18th Academy Awards (1945): The Lost Weekend: Part 1, Part 2
19th Academy Awards (1946): The Best Years of Our Lives: Part 1, Part 2
20th Academy Awards (1947): Gentleman's Agreement: Part 1, Part 2
21st Academy Awards (1948): Hamlet: Part 1, Part 2
22nd Academy Awards (1949): All The King's Men: Part 1, Part 2
23rd Academy Awards (1950): All About Eve: Part 1, Part 2
24th Academy Awards (1951): An American in Paris: Part 1, Part 2
25th Academy Awards (1952): The Greatest Show on Earth: Part 1, Part 2
26th Academy Awards (1953): From Here to Eternity: Part 1, Part 2
27th Academy Awards (1954): On the Waterfront: Part 1, Part 2
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