‘Marty’: From landmark live TV show to Oscar Best Picture winner

“I’m 36 years old and I’ve been lookin’ for a girl every Saturday night of my life. I’m a fat little ugly guy and girls don’t go for me, that’s all.” — Paddy Chayefsky’s “Marty.”

The low-budget 1955 drama “Marty” about a lonely middle-aged butcher who fears he’ll never find love became a surprise commercial and critical hit, ultimately winning Oscars for Best Picture, director for Delbert Mann, actor for Ernest Borgnine and best writing, screenplay for Chayefsky. The film would go on to win the Palme d’or at the Cannes Film Festival.

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But audiences were first introduced to “Marty” two years earlier as a live hour-long drama on NBC’s “Philco Television Playhouse,” one of the most respected early anthology series winning a 1954 Peabody and eight Emmy nominations. Rod Steiger, then 28, starred as Marty, who decides to go to a lonelyheart’s social at a local ballroom where he meets a plain young woman named Clara (Nancy Marchand). She had just been dumped there by her date. In fact, the date told Marty he would give him $5 to “take this dog home for me.” Even though there is an attraction between Marty and Clara, his friends make fun of him the next day because they have heard she is ugly. So, will Marty listen to his friends or will he call her?

“Marty,” which was also directed by Mann, celebrates its 70th anniversary on May 24th. And despite the limitations of the medium seven decades ago — kinescopes of live TV shows were shot off video monitors on 16mm film — the production is lovely with moving, emotional performances from the cast.

And it’s so relatable. Everyone knows a Marty or a Clara. Audiences could see themselves in the characters who were not movie star stunning. Plus, everybody loves an underdog story

Chayefsky, one of the top writers of live TV dramas in the 1950s who won his second Oscar for 1976’s scathing look at the medium, “Network,” wrote in his collected “Television Plays”: “I set out in ‘Marty ‘to write a love story, the most ordinary love story in the world. I didn’t want my hero to be handsome, and I didn’t want the girl to be pretty. I wanted to write a love story the way it would literally have happened to the kind of people I know…The actor who played Marty, Rod Steiger, is one of the most gifted young actors in the theater, and I own him a debt of genuine debt of gratitude for all that he contributed to the show.”

He came up with the idea for “Marty” while rehearsing with director Mann his 1952 teleplay “The Reluctant Citizen” at a New York hotel’s ballroom which transformed into the Friendship Club every Friday evening.  He took notice of a sign proclaiming “Girls, Dance with the Man who Asks You. Remember Men Have Feelings Too.” He first envisioned a woman as the central character of a drama, but soon changed his mind telling Mann he thought it would work better with a male lead.  He pitched the idea to “Philco” producer Fred Coe telling him “I want to do a play about a guy who goes to a ballroom.” Coe gave him the green light.

Esther Minciotti, Joe Mantell and Augusta Ciolli reprised their roles from the TV version for the 1955 film. But Steiger turned it down. The Oscar-winner (“In the Heat of the Night”) told me in a 1991 L.A. Times interview, he still regretted not doing the film version of “Marty”: “I got a call from Hecht-Lancaster (the producers) about doing the film version,” Steiger related. “They said to me, ‘We want to sign you to a seven-year contract.’ I said, ‘I don’t think I want to sign for seven years with anybody, but the thing that will decide it is who chooses my parts?’ They said ‘We will.’ I said, ‘No, I have a right to sleep with whom I please. You must not take my choices away from me.  I have the right to make my own mistakes.’ I believe that in life as well as acting.”

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