Paddy Chayefsky’s script of the 1955 movie Marty is the sort of movie you could not make today. Not because it is politically incorrect, but because it’s a carefully constructed masterpiece that tells a little story with some major themes. Marty won Best Picture and got a lot of critical acclaim when it hit the theaters back in the 1950s. It stars Ernest Borgnine as a “fat ugly” butcher and lesser-known Betsy Blair as an unattractive chemistry teacher. (Movie trivia: Blair was the wife of Gene Kelly who helped her get the job.)
Both character are single, living with their parents, and have failed spectacularly at getting married—the cultural expectation for them. Marty, the butcher, is 34 and Clara, the teacher, is 29. Everyone is nagging them to get married, but they’re not the pretty people. They have trouble making romantic connections.
Naturally, in this story, Marty meets Clara and they fall in love, in what may be one of the best cinematic portrayals of two people really falling in love. Marty goes to the Stardust Ballroom one Saturday night, being pushed by his mother to going out to finally find a girlfriend. A series of circumstances causes him to befriend Clara and the two not only dance together, they go out later to eat and talk and walk around New York after midnight. They go from awkward and bumbling to having long, enthusiastic conversations about essentially nothing. It was an unexpected event, charming and delightfully innocent. (Can you imagine two people falling in love on screen today in anything but a sex scene?)
You can feel the nervous energy and hear the nervous laughter, as they both silently wonder: “is this the one?” Maybe this is the one!
While Marty’s friends and family all seem to push him to get married, the minute he falls in love with Clara they change their tune. Clara is criticized by Marty’s friend as being a “dog.” Marty’s mother doesn’t like Clara because “she don’t look Italian.” And for a moment, Marty—not used to having to a potential new girlfriend to defend—is unsure how to act. It becomes clear that maybe the reason Marty hasn’t married is less about him and more about the people around him who torpedo his romantic choices.
And maybe Marty has been sold the wrong bill of goods about romance. His mother wants him to marry an Italian girl. His friends want him to date a good-looking woman. But that’s not where Marty’s life and heart led him.
I love this movie because it’s a bumpy joy ride of a romantic comedy… but with ordinary looking people. No sex scenes. No overwrought emotionalism. Just two lonely people who fall in love.
Beautiful people get to fall in love on screen all of the time. That’s the value of watching Marty. In Marty, it’s different.
On the surface, it’s a tiny story of two people who “met cute” and fell in love.
The bigger story behind it is that any time two people fall in love they have the potential to run off and start their own families. That can upend the families they’re currently in. It can make their elderly parents feel insecure. It can make friends of the same sex envious. It can change life plans. But the very foundation of society around the world is the family and families start when two people become disruptive enough to branch out on their own.
Marty is a butcher, a career he did not actively seek or even really want, but one that he accepts. He has the opportunity to buy the butcher shop, but he is unsure if it is a good investment. At first in the story, those are random considerations. But as Clara becomes more and more important to him (and the love story develops pretty quickly), that decision becomes more important. Clara has a job opportunity that might force her to move, and Marty stumbles, as all people in love, trying to both encourage her and keep her close. Marty is not really a romantic comedy, it is an exploration of what happens when an unexpected love becomes big enough to change your life.
One of the most powerful undercurrents in Marty is that life is not about being beautiful. Beautiful people get all the big roles in movies, they get all the dates, they have all of the fun. Hollywood normally celebrates that. But here, Hollywood pushes back and says, you know, sometimes plain-looking people fall in love. Sometimes ordinary people have romance. And love is not the next conquest, it’s a connection. Here it is a sudden and powerful connection between two very ordinary people.
And ordinary people are the ones who make the world go round.
That’s why this film could not be made today. In today’s cinematic or cultural world you can be beautiful or you can have green hair or you can be one of those fluid people in an evening dress with a beard. But you can’t be ordinary. Plain-looking people with boring jobs and busy-body friends and difficult families are the ones who make the world go round… and it is wonderful to see them play the kind of roles that normally go to pretty people.