The Bronx. Marty is a 34-year old butcher who lives with his mother and is under pressure to get married since all his five siblings already did. He calls a woman he met a month ago, but she rejects him. On Saturday evening, his friend Angie persuades him to go to a dance hall to meet women. When Clara (29) gets dumped by her date, a guy who found a better looking girl, Marty comforts her and they dance together. Marty and Clara talk and like each other, as he tells her he plans to buy the meat store he is working in. Marty's mother accepts her sister Catherine to live in the house, since her son Thomas is married to Virginia and they want to have privacy. Mother and Angie try to talk Marty out of seeing Clara again since she is ugly, but he still calls her again.
The first noticeable screenplay by screenwriting Paddy Chayefsky ("Hospital", "Network"), "Marty" is an honest, quiet, sincere little drama, yet today doesn't seem that fresh anymore, proving once again that a movie revolving only around a person's private feelings isn't enough to be fully cinematic. Its taboo theme of an incel is emotional and tragic, since the title character is a kind and honest soul, and he is played wonderfully by Ernest Borgnine, whereas the story shows how two ugly people, Marty and Clara, manage to nullify their "curse" by joining forces and becoming a couple. There is a great little sequence of mother and Marty talking during dinner, as he finally snaps to says out loud his suppressed pain of loneliness towards her ("Ma, sooner or later, there comes a point in a man's life when he's gotta face some facts. And one fact I gotta face is that, whatever it is that women like, I ain't got it... All that ever happened there was girls made me feel like a bug! ...I'm just a fat, ugly man."), which is electrifying and devastating at the same time. Yet besides that, the rest of the movie is pretty thin and banal, since nothing ever comes close to this sequence, and the storyline plays out like a standard melodrama at times, which feels underwritten for Chayefsky's talent. The subplots of Marty's mother accommodating her sister or Marty's friend talking about novelist Mickey Spillane don't really bring anything to the film. "Marty" is more valuable as a sociological study than as a cinematic experience, yet it has a sympathetic side to it.
Grade:++
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