Marty (1955)
“When ya gonna get married, Marty?”
Paddy Chayefsky, screenwriter of Marty, said he “set out […] to write a love story, the most ordinary love story in the world.” Well, he accomplished his mission, but unfortunately, “ordinary” is not a positive adjective one uses to describe a film.
Ernest Borgnine plays Marty Piletti, a sadsack butcher who has experienced a lot of generic heartbreak over his 34 years. But when Marty meets sadsack Clara (Betsy Blair) at the Stardust Ballroom, he finds a woman who will, uh, listen to him as he talks about himself?1 Marty’s friends tell him not to date her2, but Marty realizes that what his friends say doesn’t matter and that he should date her, end of movie. Yep, that sure is an ordinary love story.
Here’s the thing: Marty seems sort of unlovable, especially in the uncomfortable scene where he demands a kiss from Clara and mopes when he doesn’t get it. “Unlovable guys deserve to be loved” isn’t my favorite movie moral. Maybe a better message would be “unlovable guys should take steps to become more lovable”—like, for instance, by getting really, really good at trivia. Ladies love trivia guys.3
Rating: 6/10, it’s like the ‘50s version of Swingers (1996).
Cast and Crew
Ernest Borgnine. You know him best as Sgt. Fatso Judson in From Here to Eternity, but his gap-toothed grin is flexible enough to be menacing, playful, or hangdog. Borgnine takes the face that exhibited Sgt. Judson’s raw sociopathy and, as Marty, replaces it with soulfulness and humility. Marty is the pinnacle of Borgnine as a leading man, but let’s talk about his long career afterwards in both film and TV.
In the early ‘60s, Borgnine helmed “McHale’s Navy,” a sitcom that was buoyed by Borgnine’s actual Naval service during WWII. He then went back to film, getting supporting roles as an older badass in movies with varying degrees of schlock factor. He had great parts in director “Bloody Sam” Peckinpah’s movies The Wild Bunch (1969) and Convoy4 (1978), as well as roles in hits The Dirty Dozen (1967), Ice Station Zebra (1968), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), and Escape from New York (1981).
Nowadays, Borgnine might be best remembered for providing his voice to elderly superhero Mermaid Man in Stephen Hillenburg’s animated sitcom “SpongeBob SquarePants.” As an Easter egg, Mermaid Man’s sidekick, Barnacle Boy, was voiced by Borgnine’s “McHale's Navy” co-star Tim Conway.5
Borgnine had some interesting romances too. His second marriage was to Katy Jurado, who played the Mexican femme fatale in High Noon.6 The year after they split, Borgnine married Ethel Merman for 42 days; both later admitted the marriage was a colossal mistake.7 He eventually found his life partner in cosmetics queen Tova Traesnaes, the Norweigan-born creator of the cosmetics line Beauty by Tova.8
Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky is a name to know. He’s got a superlative: the only person to have won three solo Oscars for writing both adapted and original screenplays.9 Those three screenplays were for Marty, The Hospital (1971), and Network (1976).10 He was also a writer for the early TV “playhouses” that would run hourlong standalone stories (in contrast to serialized or episodic TV). Chayefsky adapted Marty from his own story that ran on “The Philco Television Playhouse”; that TV version had Rod Steiger11 in the title role. The model of “brand new content every week” was tough to maintain and we don’t have many anthology programs these days.
The Trivia
THING FROM THE PAST ALERT: Marty discusses taking a date to a Howard Johnson’s for burgers and milkshakes. Howard Johnson’s, founded by the eponymous Howard Johnson, was the largest restaurant chain in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. Its last restaurant closed in 2022, but the orange-roofed motor lodges that they opened as part of their expansion are still around (though they’re now owned by Wyndham). HoJo’s was famous for having 28 flavors of ice cream, though it was a different Howard Johnson who wrote the song “I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream.”12
Here are some other hoteliers and hospitality companies you need to know13:
Conrad Hilton (1887-1979) was the founder of the Hilton Hotels. His first hotel was the Mobley Hotel in Cisco, Texas. His son was Liz Taylor’s first husband.
César Ritz (1850-1918) was a Swiss hotelier credited with pioneering the concept of luxury hotels, especially with the Ritz Paris and the Ritz and Carlton Hotels in London. It seems easy to mix him up with William Waldorf Astor, (1848-1919), who founded the NYC Waldorf Astoria, another big fancy hotel.14
Kemmons Wilson (1913-2003) was the founder of the Holiday Inn hotel chain.15
Steve Wynn (born 1947) is the casino magnate who built the Mirage and Bellagio.
Jay and Donald Pritzker opened Hyatt House in L.A. in 1957; now Hyatt is the 3rd largest hotel brand in the world. The Pritzker Prize, the “Nobel of Architecture,” is named for that family.
Paul Dubrule and Gérard Pélisson founded Accor in 1967, which is now largest hospitality brand in Europe. It operates brands like Raffles, Sofitel, Pullman, and Fairmont.
Odds and Ends
I believe this is the first movie we’ve watched that’s passed the Bechdel test...Marty’s friend mentions Hit Parade; “Your Hit Parade” was a radio and TV program where the house orchestra played the top songs in the country16…Betsy Blair, who played Marty’s one-dimensional love interest Clara, was married to Gene Kelly for sixteen years…the boys discuss Mickey Spillane; he’s the author who created PI Mike Hammer, protagonist of novels like “I, the Jury,” “Kiss Me, Deadly,” and “My Gun is Quick”…While working at the butcher counter, a woman asks Marty for a pullet, which is a female teenage chicken; a male teenage chicken is called a cockerel.
Also, if what you wanted was “the most ordinary love story in the world” but with singing, John C. Reilly starred in a musical version of Marty in 2002.17 But no, nobody wanted that.
It reads a bit like he’s falling in love with his therapist (that’s called transference) or with an operator on the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
That advice is offered with the quote, “Marty, you don’t wanna hang around with dogs, it gives you a bad reputation.” Also, here’s an incomplete list of the words Marty’s friends use to mean “women”: “dogs,” “squirrels,” “dolls,” and “tomatoes.” Try them out at home!
[citation needed]
Convoy was based on the dumb-as-bricks 1975 C. W. McCall CB radio song of the same name that hit #1. I thought “movies based on songs” would be a pretty thin category, but it’s more common than you’d think.
Conway’s best known for his time on “The Carol Burnett Show,” especially for characters like Mr. Tudball and the Oldest Man (though if you can only remember one of the gents from that show, choose Harvey Korman). Conway was also in the Disney live-action film The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975) with Don Knotts, supporting this very odd, very specific “Family Guy” joke.
Though I didn’t mention her in that recap because I was too busy raving about Gary Cooper. Man, I love Gary Cooper.
Merman's description of the marriage in her autobiography was simply one blank page.
The Tova brand was bought by QVC, and her perfume, Tova Signature, is a big seller on that network. This factoid led me down a rabbit hole trying to find a list of the best-selling QVC products, but all that did was make me chum in the water for digital advertisers.
Though no, I don’t know how many qualifiers it takes for a superlative to stop being a superlative.
Both The Hospital and Network scored Best Actor nominations, so we’ll be watching them soon enough.
Hey, we saw him in On the Waterfront!
I guess I never thought about where that phrase came from—it feels as old as language itself—and it’s weird to think it’s just from some dumb 1920s novelty song.
Though I didn’t include hoteliers famous for non-hotel reasons, like Leona Helmsley (the “Queen of Mean”) or Robert Durst (the murderer).
The Ritz-Carlton brand is now owned by Marriott and the Waldorf Astoria is owned by Hilton.
Whose name references the 1942 Bing Crosby movie Holiday Inn.
You might know it from the “All in the Family” theme song—“boy the way Glenn Miller played / songs that topped the Hit Parade.”
With a book from Rupert Holmes of “Escape (The Piña Colada Song),” because why not.
* Just a small correction here ("Ice Station Zebra").
* Rupert Holmes is a great writer, though; he created the excellent TV series "Remember WENN" and his "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" was the first Best Musical Tony winner with book, music, and lyrics all by a single person. ("Rent," "Hamilton," "Hadestown," and "A Strange Loop" later duplicated that feat.)
* I took a class taught by the Pulitzer-winning TV critic Howard Rosenberg; he showed our class (c. 2006) both versions of Marty, and we pretty much all agreed that the earlier TV version was better. The movie has much better production values, which actually works against it, given the theme of "ordinariness," and Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand do a much better job of seeming like regular people than Borgnine and Blair.