Clara (Nancy Marchand) and Marty (Rod Steiger)
Mama’s Boy
Marty Pilletti is a butcher, a common enough profession in a common enough working-class world. His sisters and younger brother have all gotten married, but Marty’s the lone holdout. Imagine, a guy like him, with no prospects on the horizon.
“You should get married,” his customers tell him, a common enough expression from people who no doubt mean well – one they constantly repeat to themselves, but more often than not directed at good-hearted Marty. Why, he should be ashamed of himself.
“When are you going to get married?” they regularly inquire. It’s a question Marty is loath to respond. In all honesty and in view of his profession, it cuts him to the bone. Not a day goes by when he isn’t confronted with this dilemma.
Marty has a friend, Angie. About the same age, maybe younger. They commiserate together at the local drug store, or wherever they happen to meet up. He’s another one of Marty’s pals on the make. Two lonely guys from the Bronx, “losers” if you want to be cruel about it.
Angie (Joe Mantell) exchanges thoughts with Marty (Rod Steiger)
Marty is at a crossroads. He’s thirty-six, a butcher, and a fat ugly, little man that girls don’t want. He’s gotten that description into his head, and there’s nothing he can do about removing it. They have no interest in him, at least that’s what Marty believes.
His and Angie’s “old ladies” (their mothers, to be precise) ask the same question to them, over and over again: “When are you getting married? When are you getting married” It’s enough to drive a guy to drink. Thankfully, Marty’s not the type to booze it up. At least not yet, we hope.
The loneliness, the insecurity, the self-doubts, the lack of confidence, the looming despair, but most of all the fear of rejection – these are what Marty gets in return. Sure, he’s a caring guy. And more than able to hold his own. He’s also used to working hard, but is that enough? Because of this, he’s had to develop a coping mechanism, mainly excuses for not making himself available to go to the movies or the local dance hall.
The Waverly Ballroom on the Grand Concourse, that’s the place to be – it’s packed to the rafters on Saturday nights. “Loaded with tomatoes,” so states Marty’s mother, Mrs. Pilletti. Again, it’s always the same, his having to face that inevitable query, this time posed directly by Mama herself: “What you going to do tonight?”
Mama doesn’t want him hanging around the house. She’s a widow, this is true, but all her children are married – all except “poor” Marty, the oldest of the lot. Time for him to be out on his own, or so she believes. Mama has second thoughts about that too. She’s getting old, you see.
Mrs. Pilletti (Esther Minciotti)
In as matter-of-fact a manner as possible, Marty insists to his mother that she has a bachelor on her hands. “I ain’t ever going to get married,” he openly declares, as he plops another helping of food on the dinner plate. Whatever girls like he doesn’t have, so guys like him must face the facts. It’s the bachelor life for him. And that’s that.
“I’ve taken enough girls out to enough dance halls,” he contends, probably for the hundredth time. “I don’t want to get hurt no more. I called up a girl this afternoon and she gave me the brush off. Some ‘broad’ I didn’t even want to call up. I’m past the point of getting hurt.”
He confesses his feelings to Mama, hoping against hope she will finally come around to his point of view. Why doesn’t he go to the dance hall? “The place makes me feel like a bug just standing around. I had enough pain, no thank you.”
Not taking the hint or, more correctly, not wanting her son to suffer as most loving mothers would react, Mama calls out to him. But Marty is quicker on the draw: “Please, I’m gonna stay home and I’m gonna watch Sid Caesar.” Mama does not get it. Instead, she fires back with a hurtful line she knows will get a rise out of her boy. “You gonna die without a son!”
That does it. Marty repeats the line back to her. “I will die without a son!” But Mama will have none of it. Imagine! An American-born Italian descendant from the Bronx, and a hard-working butcher at that, unmarried, with no prospects for a decent family life on the horizon. That is anathema to Mama’s ears. She has to do something about it – now!
Mama tells him to wear the blue suit, but this only gets Marty more riled up. Rising abruptly from dinner table, he let’s it all out at once: “The blue suit, the gray suit, I’m a fat, ugly little man!” he shouts, while pounding the dinner table. If it’s drama Mama wants, drama she’ll get. And, brother, does her oldest son give it back to her. “I’m miserable enough as it is,” he cries out. “Whaddaya want from me? I’ll get heartache, that’s what I get. A great, big night of heartache.”
These are words and arguments he’s no doubt expressed countless times before, but never so heartfelt, never so achingly poignant as he’s doing so now. Spilling his guts out to Mama probably wasn’t in the cards either, as his poker pals might describe it. But he does so anyway. Shoot, what the heck? What’s a man got to lose?
Pulling back the pain and realizing he may have gone too far, Marty grasps the fact that he’s hurt his mother – and himself, to be honest. Surely, that was never his plan, never his intention. Gently and calmly, he bends down and kisses her on the hand. He’s at the point of breaking down but manages to control himself just enough to sit back down at the table and finish his meal.
“Oh boy,” Marty mumbles to no one in particular, then repeats the line his mother used on him at the start of their conversation: “Loaded with tomatoes… that’s rich, Mama.”
Heartache Tonight, Heartache Tonight
Directed by Delbert Mann, written by Paddy Chayefsky, and produced by Fred Coe, along with assistant producer Gordon Duff, the teleplay Marty premiered live on May 24, 1953, on the Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse show.
Writer and producer Sidney Aaron “Paddy” Chayefsky
The program, a made-for-television production, starred Rod Steiger as Marty, and Nancy Marchand as Clara, the girl at the dance hall. Two years later, the independent team of Harold Hecht and actor Burt Lancaster produced the Academy Award-winning film version of the teleplay, which starred Ernest Borgnine (an Oscar winner for Best Actor) as Marty, and Betsy Blair (then-wife to Gene Kelly) as Clara.
The movie version was partially filmed in the Bronx, near and around the Grand Concourse and Fordham Road areas, as well as Arthur Avenue and the Belmont neighborhood (across the street from Fordham University where this writer once attended and graduated from). This was a section of the Bronx known locally as “Little Italy” and made famous for its restaurants, and the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
In the original teleplay, a stocky Rod Steiger, as Marty, captures everyone’s hearts with his homespun portrayal. Steiger wears his feelings on his sleeve, so to speak. He can barely hold back the tears in the key scene, described above, with his mother (played by Esther Minciotti, who also appeared in the movie version). Joe Mantell played Angie, Lee Philips was Marty’s married cousin Tommy, and Betsy Palmer his wife Virginia (originally, Anne Bancroft, whose real name was Anne Italiano, proved too “ethnic looking,” so for contrast the producers went with Ms. Palmer).
As Chayefsky wrote the part (partly autobiographical), the butcher Marty is a broken man inside. And this is how Steiger plays him: as outwardly friendly, yet all-but-crying internally. It’s what can be called an “interior” performance, one that barely manages to bubble up to the surface; where Steiger tries mightily to hold back the floodgates as an alternative to releasing those pent up feelings of despair and sorrow with regard to the character’s failed romantic relationships.
In rehearsal, both director Mann and producer Coe tried in vain to prevent Steiger from letting it all hang out, but to no avail. According to Mann, each time he performed that scene Steiger cried his eyes out, as he was taught to do by way of his Method-actor training. Even at the dress rehearsal, Steiger welled up inside so much that the dam would literally break open, and tears would pour out in full force.
Mann and Coe could not let that happen. Their take on the matter was that actors make the audience weep, not the other way around. After all, this was live television. How could they go on with the show when their principal lead had given so much of himself so soon to the little screen? In their minds, the climax would come too soon.
When the time arrived for the dinner table talk with Minciotti, Steiger came almost to the point of weeping. But instead of breaking down (as he had done on prior occasions), he got hold of himself, so that his delivery was chopped up into tiny fragments, the most memorable of which was the now-immortal line, “I’m an ugly man, I’m a fat ugly, little man.” It’s absolutely devastating, as it was meant to be.
Marty willfully tries to cover up the pain. He’s embarrassed or ashamed – and a little of both. In the tiny, round television screens that were prevalent in the early 1950s, Steiger’s natural bulk appears to resize itself down to near gnome-like proportions, resulting in the large-framed Italian butcher’s reduction to a whimpering pile of human flesh. He’s comparable to a misbehaving child, left cringing alone in the corner for some minor infraction or other.
This timely bit of self-control no doubt saved the scene from over-playing its hand, which had the intended effect: audiences around the country cried their hearts out for the fat ugly, little man.
In Ernest Borgnine’s movie take, the scene is the same, the lines are the same, but the intimacy that the small screen allowed viewers to experience (specifically, via Steiger’s reductive approach) were, in the movie theater, broader and larger than life, in the sense that Borgnine was playing to a wider, more varied audience.
Clara (Betsy Blair) with Marty (Ernest Borgnine)
It’s as if he and director Mann had aimed their sites at the topmost gallery; as if the audience were seated in New York’s Yankee Stadium, specifically in the last row of the upper bleachers. Consequently, Borgnine comes off as, well, larger than life too, as were his emotional reactions. In this scenario, one has little doubt that Marty Pilletti is indeed a big, fat mama’s boy.
Ernest Borgnine as Marty smacking the Bus Stop sign
Borgnine, because of his natural size and heft, is more physical as well. And he uses his physicality to good effect – this actor is unafraid to let his gut hang out in full view of the audience. But then, we lose a little something in the interim, in the transfer from one medium (those round-screen television sets previously mentioned) to the larger and wider movie venue.
Still, that improvised action at the bus stop, where Marty instinctively punches the sign with his fist after a successful night out with the girl Clara, left audiences laughing and crying, both at the same time. That’s what good acting is about! A spontaneous, in-the-moment inspiration.
This Operatic Life
Both Borgnine and Steiger keep getting the brushoff. At the ballroom, a guy walks up to Marty and tries to unload a “dog” on him. This guy has found a “hot chick,” so he wants to dump his date on the next available chump. He even offers to pay Marty five bucks if he will take the so-called “dog” off his hands. Chivalrous to the end, Marty refuses. “You can’t just walk out on a girl like that.” Marty is indignant – and rightly so, after having been on the receiving end of rejections for as long as he can remember.
In the teleplay, the girl is tall and big boned, with a prominent proboscis. Disgusted and insulted at being treated like a bargaining chip, the poor girl heads for the nearest side exit to cry her eyes out – undoubtedly, a routine matter for her. Does this all sound familiar? It sure does! With Marty, however, the girl, Clara, gets up the courage to confess to him that this happens every time she comes to the dance hall. He knows exactly how she feels.
Understanding soul that he is, Marty decides to open up and make a confession of his own: “Big-hearted, you get to be a professor of pain.” What a masterful line! Two lonely people, out on the dance floor: he’s thirty-six, she’s twenty-nine, an old maid to most mother’s eyes. They dance and they talk, spilling their guts out to one another, commiserating in mutual bliss. Two “dogs,” together at last. Marty chats about his ugly father who was so kind to his mother and to each other. Still, they dance and talk some more, for what seems an eternity.
Lest the idea be lost on readers, writer Chayefsky, who in his own life experienced as much pain and rejection from girls due to his short, stocky build and unconventional nature, has captured on screen and at home the essence of Puccini’s La Bohème, with all its heartache and anguish. From their initial “meet-cute,” Marty embodies the poet Rodolfo, an old-fashioned romantic at heart, while Clara is the good-natured Mimì. No, she does not die of tuberculosis as her counterpart does, but then… who knows what life has in store for these lovebirds?
As Clara, Marchand (in the teleplay) uses her imposing height to denote awkwardness, her big-boned features made prominent in comparison to Steiger’s softer-edged contours. She’s all arms and elbows and angularity, externalizing her manner and gawky bearing to accentuate the awkwardness, whereas Steiger internalizes his thoughts and actions.
Clara (Nancy Marchand) seated at the kitchen table with Marty (Rod Steiger)
In their conversation, Steiger holds back the pain but feels no less deeply; Marchand represents the embodiment of his prior rejections, thereby giving “Marty” a sense of his own painful dismissal by others. Thus, two lonely hearts come together as one in spite of being cast aside as unworthy by the standards of the time. How they are able to come together, slowly but cautiously, is accomplished through conversation and getting to understand one another’s feelings. Wrong moves are made, but quickly forgiven. After all, they are so much alike. In fact, they seem to attract one another, their self-awareness binding them closer.
Both artists went on to further their careers, Steiger in films and Marchand in theater and television. Taking nothing away from either Borgnine or Blair, who was “prettier” conventionally with respect to her looks, I have always been moved by Steiger’s interpretation – credit, by the way, to Delbert Mann for insisting the actor hold back those tears. “You make the audience cry for you,” Mann has conveyed in numerous interviews and in print. By doing so, the performances truly hit home.
Curiously, Steiger and Borgnine enacted their share of movie heavies. They both played Italian mobsters: Rod as mobster Al Capone in Al Capone (1959), and Ernest as an opera-loving Italian policeman in Pay or Die (1960). Both joined the Navy in World War II, both studied acting upon their return from overseas duty, both excelled at villainous and/or sinister types, usually of an ethnic bent. And both won Oscars for Best Actor (Borgnine for Marty and Steiger for In the Heat of the Night).
Steiger was the younger of the two, born 1925 in Westhampton, New York. Borgnine was born in 1917, by way of Hamden, Connecticut. Nancy Marchand was born in 1928, in Buffalo, New York, and became a notable stage actor, while Betsy Blair (born 1923), made a handful of films in Hollywood, and later in Italy.
Both Steiger and Borgnine were (if you’ll pardon the expression) “fat ugly, little men.” Yet their triumph is our triumph. One could coin the phrase “they knew the type well” without the slightest exaggeration. That’s rich, all right!
Copyright © 2023 by Josmar F. Lopes
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