28th Academy Awards (1956)
Nominations: 8
Wins: 4
Well, I’m sorry to report that none of this year’s best picture nominees are remakes of previous Oscar-winning best pictures, which means I needed a new gimmick for the 2024 Oscars Fortnight. The one I settled on were best picture nominees that were made by first-time directors, since there are actually two of them up for the award this year, American Fiction and Past Lives (I’ll be writing about both). Now, you may be wondering, how often does someone’s first feature get nominated for film’s most prestigious award? I don’t know! I didn’t find a comprehensive list anywhere, but I know some of the movies we’ve already covered, like Citizen Kane and Dances with Wolves, were directorial debuts so it can’t be insanely rare. Who cares? All that really matters is I got the perfect movie to watch around the Valentines season, so let’s get into Marty!
Marty Piletti (Ernest Borgnine) is a 34-year-old bachelor who works at an Italian butcher shop in The Bronx, where he is constantly harangued by customers for being a romantic loser. Marty’s younger brothers and sisters are all settled down, happily married and raising families of their own, while Marty is resigned to living with their mother, Teresa (Esther Minciotti). So he spends his days being told by customers that he should be ashamed of himself, begged by his dirtbag best friend Angie (Joe Mantell) to go clubbing, and suffering at the whims of his increasingly oppressive mom. On this particular Saturday night, Marty is so down in the dumps he doesn’t even know what to do with himself, which is why he caves into pressure from his mom and Angie to go to the Stardust Ballroom – even though he’s sure the night can only end in more heartache.
At the Stardust Ballroom, Angie goes off on his own to while Marty gets rejected by the girls there. Meanwhile, a young teacher named Clara (Betsy Blair) is in the process of being rejected by her blind date (Alan Wells) because he’s a superficial piece of shit. Calling her a “dog,” the asshole approaches Marty and asks him to take Clara off his hands for five bucks. Of course, Marty is a good dude and immediately declines the offer and chastises the blind date… only for this scumbag to just find another guy and give him the same offer. Marty watches helplessly as Clara rejects being pawned off and, humiliated, runs outside to the balcony. He follows her and asks her for a dance.
“Two people get married and are gonna live together for forty or fifty years so it’s gotta be more than whether they’re just good-looking or not… You see, dogs like us, we ain’t such dogs as we think we are.” Marty explains his view on love pretty early on into knowing Clara and that seems to also be the movie’s message too – that a relationship is a lot of things and really has very little to do with physical attraction. What’s interesting is how the movie also focuses on the social elements of getting into a couple: once Marty is smitten with Clara, his “friends” try to convince him to not call her back for being too plain-looking and his mom insults her for fear of losing her control over Marty (and thus her purpose in life because the fifties sucked). It’s one wrinkle of cynicism in an otherwise adorably romantic movie, which makes it all the more surprising that this was written by Paddy Chayefsky of The Hospital and Network fame.
Chayefsky wrote “Marty” as an hour-long teleplay for the anthology The Philco Television Playhouse in 1953. He goal was to literally write “the most ordinary love story in the world.” That version starred Rod Steiger as Marty and was the TV debut for Nancy Marchand (aka Livia Soprano) as Clara. Delbert Mann, one of the stable of alternating directors on The Philco Television Playhouse, directed it, along with more than 100 other live TV dramas. Chayefsky and Mann re-teamed for the feature-length version, which served as Mann’s film debut. They recast Marty and Clara but some of the supporting cast appear in both versions. It earned Chayefsky, Mann, and Borgnine Oscars and went on to win Best Picture that year too. Mann continued to have a storied career, directing many projects including another adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front with Borgnine, and serving as president of the DGA. But nothing ever seemed to rise to the level of Marty, one of the ultimate feel-good Best Picture winners in Oscars history. I love to see it.