Marty

Marty is perhaps the film with the lowest relative budget to ever win the Best Picture Oscar, which it did in 1955. The cost was $383,000, and the studio spent 400 grand on it's Oscar campaign. Legend has it that the producers, Harold Hecht and Burt Lancaster, had made the movie with the expectation it would lose money and be a tax write-off. If that was the plan, it backfired.

Marty is also the only Best Picture winner to be based on a TV show. It was a teleplay, written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Delbert Mann (who both moved over to the film version). Rod Steiger and Nancy Marchand, however, were replaced by Ernest Borgnine and Besty Blair, respectively. It is also the only film to win both the Palme D'Or at Cannes and the Oscar.

It's a simple tale of kitchen-sink realism about a kindhearted Bronx butcher, Borgnine, who is in his mid-thirties and just about given up on love. He tells his mother that he's a fat, ugly man and that he's tired of being hurt. Early in the film there's a heartbreaking scene where he calls a girl on the phone and gets the brush off. We don't hear what she's saying, but we know it from the way he closes his eyes and absorbs the pain. But he goes out with his buddy, Joe Mantell, to a dance hall. He witnesses a plain schoolteacher, Blair, getting dumped by a callow blind date. He asks her to dance, and a romance blossoms.

The next day, his mother and friends discourage him, saying she's not good-looking enough (his mother, who pushes him to get married, is suddenly worried she'll get the boot out of the house should a daughter-in-law move in). Borgnine eventually realizes he doesn't care, and at the end of the film calls her up.

Chayefsky's script is almost musical as it captures the dialects of the characters. A famous exchange comes when Mantell and Borgnine try to figure out what to do for the night--"What do you feel like doin' tonight?" "I don't know, what do you feel like doin'?" There's also a hysterical scene with Borgnine's friends discussing the fine literary style of Mickey Spillane. Occasionally this goes way over the top--when Marty's mother and his aunt have scenes together their thick accents make it seem like an Italian minstrel show. But the byplay between Borgnine and Blair (Mrs. Gene Kelly in real life) was brilliant, and perfectly captured the feelings of two lonelyhearts as they stumble toward what they thought was impossible.

Borgnine, Mann, and Chayefsky all won Oscars. Heretofore Borgnine had been known chiefly as a heavy in films like From Here to Eternity, but he would go on to a long and varied career, which is still going today.