In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based entirely on where my interests lead me.
After the conclusion of World War II, television caught on in the United States like nowhere else in the world. This phenomenon was fueled in part by the fact that the American economy was booming and people had money to spend, in contrast to many European and Asian countries who had to rebuild after years of hardship and destruction coupled with substantial population losses. According to Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, in 1948, about 1% of American households owned a television set, while by 1955, that number had risen to 75%.
We could argue forever about whether America’s early and widespread adoption of home television was a good thing or a bad thing, but it is certainly the reality. Of course owning a television is useless is useless unless there’s programming to watch, and many companies jumped into the market to produce programs to fill up the airwaves, from sit-coms to quiz programs to variety shows. Much of this programming is forgettable, but there were also quality dramatic programs produced for live TV that incorporated many of the most talented writers and actors in the business. Eight of those programs are presented in the Criterion Collection release The Golden Age of Television; all were captured on kinescope and are presented with a variety of special features. Because each work included in this collection is nearly the equivalent of a full-length movie, I’m reviewing them one at a time.
Marty, written by Paddy Chayefsky for the Philco Television Playhouse (Philco was an electronics manufacturer; it was common in early television for a single company to sponsor a program) and starred Rod Steiger as Marty, Esther Minciotti as Marty’s mother, Joe Mantell as Marty’s best pal Angie, and Nancy Marchand (who you may remember as Tony Soprano’s mother) as a young woman who plays a key role in Marty’s story.
Marty is 36, employed (he works in a butcher shop), and well-integrated into his urban community, cheerfully filling orders while chatting with his customers. Yet he has a big problem: single at age 36, he’s given up on the possibility of getting married. This fact distresses his mother no end, because no marriage means no children (in particular no son) for Marty and no grandchildren for her. Marty is also distressed by his single state but sees himself as “a fat ugly little man” who has had no success with the ladies, unlike the slicker more conventionally attractive Angie, and is trying to protect himself from further disappointment by giving up.
Chayefsky described Marty as a love story, and that is certainly part of what makes it tick, but I think there’s something more interesting going on as well. The real question facing Marty is this: problem is this: will he continue to conform to the (rather shallow and childish) values of his male pals, most notably Angie, or is he going to grow up and make his own choices without being limited by concerns about what “the guys” will say? That he faces this choice demonstrates one of the downsides to being part of a homogenous, close-knit community such as the one in which Marty lives: he embraces the community’s values, but he’s also the guy who doesn’t quite fit in. Given those circumstances, he has several choices: try to remake himself to be more like others (his mother’s preference), reject the community entirely and take himself elsewhere (which would probably kill his mother and cut him off from everything he knows), or to decide which of his community’s values are worth embracing and which should be rejected.
The print of Marty looks surprisingly good, given that it is a copy of a copy created by recording the images from monitor as the show aired. The sets are basic but create a recognizable world (one thing non-New Yorkers are often surprised by is how economical people in the city must be with space) while the actors create familiar, believable characters within the show’s world. The simple production values allow the writing and acting to shine and if the visual quality is not that of a current movie, it’s perfectly adequate given the context. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 495
Technical details: 52 min.; B&W; 1.33:1; English.
Edition reviewed: DVD (3 discs).
Extras: introduction hosted by Eva Marie Saint for the 1981 PBS television series The Golden Age of Television, featuring interviews with Rod Steiger, Nancy Marchand, Betsy Palmer, and Delbert Mann; audio commentary by director Delbert Mann. The Criterion web site mentions a booklet including an essay by Ron Simon and liner notes for each program but it was missing from the library copy I reviewed.
Fun Fact: Marty may be most best-known today for the role the movie version played in Robert Redford’s ode to early television, Quiz Show (1994). where it plays a key role in the plot and in the character develop of Herb Stempel (John Turturro), who is more bothered about being thought to not know the answer to a simple question than he is about the fraud taking place on the program or by the prejudice behind it.
Parting Thought: We’ve seen many television shows and movies featuring a “Hollywood Homely” character (usually female and played by a conventionally attractive actress) who is transformed by simple means like taking off their glasses or letting down their hair. There are no such physical changes in Marty but instead a change of values. Are there other mainstream dramatic productions that take a similar approach to the issues of looksism?
