Landed on Marty after Amazon Prime suggested I watch Marty next after watching Dead End. It was past midnight and Marty was only 90 minutes long and boasted 4 Oscars from 1955 including the best picture, best director and best actor. Why not? Marty it was, to top off the night.
Marty is the story of Marty Piletti, a mid thirties bachelor butcher, living with his Italian American mother in the Bronx of the fifties. Like mid-thirties bachelors the world-over Marty too is harangued by his mother to marry and bring a girl home as soon as he can. But it is not easy for Marty, played by Ernest Borgnine, he is no Humphrey Bogart at forty five charming the socks of a nineteen year old Lauren Bacall. Marty is a stocky 35-year old butcher who ends up standing on the sidelines at the local dance hall the entire night on any given Saturday.
As luck would have it on one of those Saturdays he meets the female Marty. Betsy Blair (Gene Kelley's first wife) plays Clara who is a high school chemistry teacher, which I believe must have been a quite nerdy occupation for women of that era, who at 29 is also having a hard timing finding a life partner. Blair was one of the actors blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Gene Kelley, her husband had to strong arm the producers and threaten them he would quit the movie he was acting in if they didn't give the role to Blair.
Ernest Borgnine as Marty and Betsy Blair as Clara in Delbert Mann's Marty
This Delbert Mann movie feels like an international movie set in Bronx, where the inter-generational chaos of an Italian American joint family is on full display. Its relatability and down-to-earth script and cast might be why it became the first film ever to win the prestigious Palme d'Or when the award was introduced in 1955.
It is a leaden gray Saturday evening, raining dense into the night. I am stuck on Guru Dutt. Pyaasa (Thirst/Yearning) rests heavy on my mind, Kaagaz ke Phool (Paper Flowers) is not light as the title means, although this must be the second or third time I am watching these films, but years and life had happened in between.
I scour the internet and read or watch every single piece on Guru Dutt, one of India's legendary directors/actors. I read about his friendship with Dev Anand, I leaf through the chapters of his life with his wife and the singer who lend her voice to the songs in several of his movies - Geeta Dutt nee Roy Chaudhary, his team of creative minds who got together in every film of his - cinematographer V.K.Murthy, director/writer Abrar Alvi, his muse, actress Waheeda Rehman, actors Johnny Walker, Rehman. I find that he lost a ton of money on Kaagaz ke Phool - India's first cinemascope which was a movie he directed to showcase the talents of his cinematographer friend Murthy. How he recouped his losses with Chaudvin ka Chaand.
The more I read or watch interviews I realize how much Guru Dutt is the poster boy for the temperamental, mercurial artist. For a mind in such constant state of disquiet, who brought his emotions and life translated raw into cinematic medium (referring to Kaagaz ke Phool & Pyaasa), it seems almost unlikely that he would exit through a natural death. Of course he didn't. I read about his last evening with his brother, Abrar Alvi and Shakti Samantha before he committed suicide or had an accidental overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol. He was 39.
Film schools all over the world teach Pyaasa and Kaagaz ke Phool to the students of world cinema. Kaagaz ke phool is a movie about the world of movies. Its camera is turned inward on a director down on his luck played by Guru Dutt himself. Although now regarded as a classic of Indian cinema, Guru Dutt stopped directing movies and confined himself to production and acting after the failure of Kaagaz ke Phool at the box office.
Much has been analyzed and written about Guru Dutt's body of work. He would make three or four movies that would appeal to the public and keep the counters ringing before plunging deep into his pet project, like Pyaasa or Kaagaz ke Phool. Guru Dutt the artist, the director, seem to have a real serious case of melancholia, so much so that Dev Anand once remarked after Guru Dutt's passing that Guru Dutt was a young man, he should have made happy films instead of stories about depressed people.
This is the only footage of Guru Dutt in color, the famous song from the movie of the same name, Chaudvin ka Chaand
Humphrey Bogart looks uncharacteristically handsome in the movie that changed the course of his career from a failing actor to a super star. His voice delivery still sounds like metal grating on metal in slow motion, was it considered cool in those days to drawl like that ? Bogart signature deadpan drawl contrasts effectively against Leslie Howard's impassioned character of a washed-up writer vagabond and the half-French desert rose played by Bette Davis. As a lover of history, anthropology, culture and as a curious onlooker of societal evolution, I love to watch old black and white Hollywood movies - what once was, why it was and why it never will be, all explained in a nice two hour package.
There were a lot of others like Sunset Boulevard - the premise of an aging star, a struggling new comer, both at different corners of the ring and the beast they've to fight is the same - the movie industry, but they all came later this is the grand original of all those scripts.
For all the lovers of movies about movies, Sunset Boulevard should be a staple. You get to see the Hollywood right after WW2, those b-w streets of LA with little or no traffic, the grand mansions of the yester-year's stars with Sullivenisque architecture and those struggling to make big it in the movie industry (same then as now.) William Holden and Gloria Swanson are the two pillars which hold this movie named after the most famous road in Hollywood, thereby the iconic of tinsel town dreams of many a man and woman, together and they do a fine job at it. A fine movie to take trip down the memory lane to 1950s with distinguished director Billy Wilder.
You have reached one of the oldest, continually updated blogs on Blogger / Blogspot. Active since 2003. Twenty three years and counting. Enjoy your stay. If you are interested, you can read the beginning of my blogging journey here
This blog started as a movie log way back in 2003. About 20% of the movies I watch makes it to these pages, the rest are gobbled up by my powerful Procrastinator machine. I, the author of the blog hides under a fictional profile called Different Drummer. But please don't misunderstand that I am an authority on drums. I won't be able to tell a snare drum from a bass drum and the only drums I've ever owned are ear-drums. Nor am I any different from any of you. It is just a name. For more, read the About page.
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