People will sometimes try to recommend Marty in light of the incel movement or the “male loneliness epidemic,” but you can safely ignore that sort of talk.
Per your footnote about Ernest Borgnine's face: it feels important to share here that I met him when I was a teenager, and his face in person was still *dazzling* in just the way you describe. A beautifully compelling man to look at, and charming as anything, even to a pink-haired 16 yr old who barely knew who he was.
There exists — or existed — a musical based on this movie, by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams (the team behind Bye Bye Birdie and Annie and a few other shows.) As far as I know, it played Boston for a few months in about 2003, got a little buzz but never quite managed a Broadway transfer, and has never been performed again. It was a very odd thing, partly because it changed the general crankiness of all the background characters into Lovable Curmudgeons and Happy Dancing Villagers, which is just a very different vibe. You just can’t be cranky in quite the same way while singing, unless you’re in Sondheim. So you had all these festive chorus numbers, with everyone dancing while they buy their meat, framing the sort of limpid glowing sadness of John C Reilly, fully in his Mr Cellophane era, as Marty, longing for love in approximately the same way a cartoon mouse longs for cheese. Also his accent was mildly hokey and the music deeply and painfully sentimental.
I was just thinking about how in this movie someone (Marty’s mother, I think) says the Stardust Ballroom is “loaded with tomatoes” 🍅 A line that has stuck with me since age ~10 when I first watched Marty! {Tomato = hot woman}
This is wonderful. Just do all the movies. One thing: it’s not Tom Hagen who shuts the door on Kay. It’s the great actor Richard Bright, who steals the suitcase in the first Getaway, and who plays Timothy Hutton’s father in Beautiful Girls. His name in The Godfather is Al Neri.
The move at the end, where Marty repeats Mrs. Fusari's line back to Angie right before closing the phone booth door like Al Neri shutting out Kay, is the reading that makes the whole film feel differently than I expected it to. He's not escaping, he's joining the conveyor belt and claiming his place on it. The Aunt Catherine subplot left unresolved is exactly the right decision, because resolution would imply her problems are solvable and they are not. She wants to be a vampire king and marriage is just the next feeding ground.
Per your footnote about Ernest Borgnine's face: it feels important to share here that I met him when I was a teenager, and his face in person was still *dazzling* in just the way you describe. A beautifully compelling man to look at, and charming as anything, even to a pink-haired 16 yr old who barely knew who he was.
There exists — or existed — a musical based on this movie, by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams (the team behind Bye Bye Birdie and Annie and a few other shows.) As far as I know, it played Boston for a few months in about 2003, got a little buzz but never quite managed a Broadway transfer, and has never been performed again. It was a very odd thing, partly because it changed the general crankiness of all the background characters into Lovable Curmudgeons and Happy Dancing Villagers, which is just a very different vibe. You just can’t be cranky in quite the same way while singing, unless you’re in Sondheim. So you had all these festive chorus numbers, with everyone dancing while they buy their meat, framing the sort of limpid glowing sadness of John C Reilly, fully in his Mr Cellophane era, as Marty, longing for love in approximately the same way a cartoon mouse longs for cheese. Also his accent was mildly hokey and the music deeply and painfully sentimental.
I was just thinking about how in this movie someone (Marty’s mother, I think) says the Stardust Ballroom is “loaded with tomatoes” 🍅 A line that has stuck with me since age ~10 when I first watched Marty! {Tomato = hot woman}
This is wonderful. Just do all the movies. One thing: it’s not Tom Hagen who shuts the door on Kay. It’s the great actor Richard Bright, who steals the suitcase in the first Getaway, and who plays Timothy Hutton’s father in Beautiful Girls. His name in The Godfather is Al Neri.
you’re right and i’m a fool! will fix shortly
The move at the end, where Marty repeats Mrs. Fusari's line back to Angie right before closing the phone booth door like Al Neri shutting out Kay, is the reading that makes the whole film feel differently than I expected it to. He's not escaping, he's joining the conveyor belt and claiming his place on it. The Aunt Catherine subplot left unresolved is exactly the right decision, because resolution would imply her problems are solvable and they are not. She wants to be a vampire king and marriage is just the next feeding ground.