Marty

I didn't see a thread for this movie posting yet. I saw it awhile ago and I thought it was really great. Borgnine's performance was spectacular.

So what do you want to do?

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It reminds me of a toilet paper on the trees
- Paula

Marty was a great movie. Best Picture winner. I throw it on once a year.

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"Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and like it, never really care for anything else thereafter." - Ernest Hemingway

I don't know Ang. What do you want to do?

I think he means: did you intend for this thread to be a place for reviews? General discussion about the film? Both?

I guess I didn't clarify it to be for discussion, though it seems not a lot of people have seen it.

Smooth return!

Guess it depends on which "lot of people" you're talking about. If it's the "lot of people" born since 1980 or even 1970, then no, not many of them have seen it. But then there are still a lot of folks my age who remember when the movie was released and all the press it got at the time, made Borgnine a star, and won the Academy Award for best picture. It was even spoofed at the time in Mad Magazine. It was one of those "must see" films at the time, and a hell of a lot of folks lined up for showings. It's also been seen by lots of fans and studied by lots of film students.

One of the things that always struck me as kinda odd about that film being a major breakthrough in Borgnine's career playing a decent, gentle, middle-age guy, breaking out of the ruts already worn into his life, and reaching out in loneliness and love to a nice woman he meets who also needs someone to love her: It's a very tender story, and the type of role it's hard to remember Borgnine ever playing again in his entire career. The only other role I can recall in which he played just a common-place, inoffensive guy was his short turn as one of the stranded oilfield workers in the original The Flight of the Phoenix. But that character wasn't playing with a full deck because of a head injury or breakdown of some sort. Most of the roles I remember Borgnine playing were tough guys like in Bad Day at Black Rock and The Wild Bunch, roles that were a far cry from Marty.

As I remember it, too, Marty was first done on TV, on one of those live performance drama programs from the early days of television, with Rod Steiger in the title role.

If you're old like rufnek and me you have seen it. You turn on the damn TV back in the day and it was running on some channel. And the girl Borgnine wanted to nail was no dog despite what the dialogue kept telling us. It was a good looking woman who was married to Gene Kelly at the time without makeup. Now the one Rod Steiger was trying to hook up with in the previous TV version, Nancy Marchand, that was a dog, good actress, but yech.

Marty is just one of those feel-good fun story films. It's not like in reality its the best film in the world, but it seems like a movie that you could just watch over and over again. But it is one of those films that doesn't necessarily garner the interest of watching to the younger crowd.