The 1953 TV movie Marty, written by Paddy Chayefsky, was a bright shining moment in the "Golden Age" of television. The story of a homely butcher wasting away under the strain of terminal bachelorhood and melancholy loneliness, it's a triumph of ordinary people working through ordinary problems. Chayefsky was immediately lauded for his honest writing and creative inspiration at a time when much of mass entertainment was, and still is, focused on beautiful people doing glamorous things. His teleplay was also widely seen as a highly reflexive project although such sentiments were equally true of the movie's star, Rod Steiger, who thereafter became a celebrated movie and TV actor just as Chayefsky launched himself into the rarefied circle of important American writers.

More generally the early 1950s was a time when television was new and cutting its teeth on a group of New York stage influenced writers, directors, designers, technicians and actors. Together this motley group worked at finding solutions to the demands of a flat screen medium and discovered the influence of the form with its unprecedented penetration into American living rooms, if not also the psyche of America.

Broadcast standards of the time demanded broadly themed material that would play well in urban and rural areas alike meaning much of what was produced was a showcase of film and stage stars engaged in their signature activities. There were variety shows featuring all different kinds of performers just as there were news programs, sitcoms and hour-long dramas devoted to plays provided by the pens of an ever changing set of writers.

From such a fertile backdrop, friendly to both the written word and fine stagecraft, was encouraged the early high water marks of a developing medium with obvious artistic and commercial aspects. So too was there encouragement for the many performers who used their efforts in early TV, sometimes in obscurity, to hone their craft, set career directions and instill a place in the hearts and minds of supportive audiences.

Marty was clearly one of the keynotes of the era and one of the better-remembered TV dramas of the times. It helped spawn a sensibility devoted to the common man along with an idea about how well written television drama was equal to any of the other dramatic forms, live theater included. As such it contributed to the consideration of TV as a serious and artistic medium that has continued a long debate through the present with supporters who site it's capability to inspire viewers even as detractors point out the rampant, and therefore corrupting, commercial subsidy of the entire enterprise.

Following Marty's original broadcast producer Harold Hecht, along with his silent partner Burt Lancaster, optioned the property and hired Chayefsky to adapt it for the big screen. To this end sequences that had been enclosed in a small, three-room studio due to the exigencies of live television broadcasts were blown out to accommodate several indoor and outdoor settings in the Bronx and three days of on-screen action. The main characters and the thrust of the play, however, were left largely unchanged with whole lines of dialogue transplanted into the ensuing movie script as spoken by the original characters. But the demands of cinema required a few significant changes with Ernest Borgnine substituting for Steiger along with the addition of an optimistic title pop song over the film's closing credits.

Tagged with the line, "It's the love story of an unsung hero!", Delbert Mann's Marty thrilled audiences in Europe where it first played well at the Cannes Film Festival and then opened domestically with a similar brand of expectant praise. The story's fundamental sensitivity about awkward adults caught in the drab, repetitive ordinariness of their lives was striking to a post-War audience, many of whom were struggling with similar issues. Not insignificantly the film emphasized its ethnic, working class American milieu to play up the idea of an integrated and bustling world somehow passing by just outside of reach.

In similar fashion to his TV forebear, Borgnine worked against type where he was usually cast as a ruffian and celluloid heavy to instead portray a sensitive and big-hearted man. His depiction of Mary Pilletti is characterized by a pleasant grin and concern for the welfare of others along with a healthy appetite and subtly repressed control over his anger and frustration. Living with his mother, Mrs. Pilletti (Esther Minciotti), a classic Italian matriarch who lords over the last of her six children, and the oldest, because the others have married and started lives elsewhere, their relationship is filled with affection and mutual concern.

The crux of Marty's story comes about when he and his best friend, Angie (Joe Mantell), visit the Starlight Ballroom to dance and pick up girls on a Saturday night on the town. Based on previous experience neither actually believes he'll be successful in the hotspot but Marty manages to meet Clara Snyder (Betsy Blair), a definitive school marm, and they begin a gentle courtship that's as sincere as it's unexpected.

Naturally Angie is jealous of his best friend's potential new girlfriend, Mrs. Pilletti becomes concerned about her oldest son's changing fortunes while Marty finds himself confused by the treasure of budding romance. After hemming and hawing he finally calls Clara for a second date, much to the chagrin of his shocked friends, and in so doing he admonishes them for their tribe mentality when all any of them really want is to be happy in a loving marriage.

Really just a character study set over three days in the life of Marty Pilletti, Mann's drama is never more than a high level sociological study of adult neuroses about coupling and marriage. Though later times would call out these politics as awfully retrograde the movie is content to repeatedly sell the value of men and women joining together in marriage as the most natural thing in the world. To audiences of 1955 such an idea was surely quite conventional and it's in the depth of the pursuit, the crushing, soul-bending sadness associated with failing in this achievement, that Marty derives its emotional heft.

Accordingly the film slips a bit in its necessarily quick conclusion because we only learn about Marty and Clara's first date and are left to conclude for ourselves what will happen to them somewhere down the road. Optimism about their prospects aside, Chayefsky's script is simplistic when it concludes the film as if Marty and Clara were nothing more than unhappy shadows waiting for the right combination of desperation and opportunity to join them with whoever crossed their path and fit the bill of holy matrimony. Perhaps this was the point but to hang the hat of the year's most important movie on this half-baked notion, at least according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, is at least a little bit disingenuous.

The way marriage is a fetish experience that's both held up and undercut as the end-all, be-all of success is both deeply troubling and oddly nostalgic throughout Marty. Troubling because it supposes the necessity of individual validation from an outside source and nostalgic because this supposition presumes a less complicated moral universe than the one in which we now daily survive.

How Marty went on to win the Academy Award in light of its relatively slight value, even when considering its timeliness and popularity, is anyone's guess. Nominated as it was against Love is a Many Splendored Thing, Mister Roberts, Picnic and The Rose Tattoo, none of which are still considered among the best titles of 1955, Mann's picture seems to have won its distinction as a matter of attrition. That is, it was the best of a limited group even though there were easily five more remarkable, but overlooked, films despite the emphasis of the Academy with its emphasis on citations and statuettes.

Heading the list is a pair of James Dean movies, Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden, which, along with Giant the next year, completed the extant oeuvre of a screen legend. Then there was Robert Mitchum's tour de force in The Night of the Hunter, Alfred Hitchcock's imminently enjoyable To Catch a Thief and the Spencer Tracy adventure-turned-social-problem-technology showcase in the CinemaScope Bad Day at Black Rock, also featuring Borgnine in a supporting role.

Any of these five films would have been a preferable Oscar winner to Marty. Still, the Academy pressed on with is paean to Lancaster's production company, the value of the TV crossovers and the importance of little films that win hearts with honest sentiment rather than a reliance on spectacle or superstars to set the screen on fire.

I accept Marty as an appropriate, realist entertainment in its moment and I agree there is an important place for this kind of film. It affirms ordinariness and the strength of the human struggle for happiness and manages to create its tension building three-dimensional characters as much visible to us for their foibles as for their strengths. But what it isn't, and what I think an Academy Award winning movie is supposed to be, is great.

In other words, Marty is a fine for what it intends. Even so, it doesn't amount to great cinema inasmuch as it clearly delivers great television as evidence of the place and medium where such intimate dramas of broad appeal and easy humanism truly belong.