News & Articles

An Amish Ernest Borgnine stabs his pitchfork into sociopathic bank robber Lee Marvin in Violent Saturday.

Have you ever wanted to really like a movie, and it starts out so promising, doing all the things you know it takes to make a good movie, and then see it dissolve into TV movie of the week pap?

So sad.

It happened to me recently when I tuned into a movie from the Criterion Channel’s new collection called Murderous Melodrama – 14 films made between 1945 and 1960, mixing film noir with melodrama (aka, soap opera).

The highlight among them is Henry Hathaway’s 1953 Niagara, featuring Marilyn Monroe at the height of her movie starriness. It’s always worth watching, but I wanted to taste from a fresh source, an unseen movie.

It was an easy pick when I saw Richard Fleischer’s name attached to the 1955 Violent Saturday. Three years before Fleischer had directed the taut, concise, 71-minute black & white film noir The Narrow Margin, one of my favorites.

Film noir stalwart Victor Mature rubs the head of skeptical cinematic son Billy Chapin.

Plus, Violent Saturday is jam packed with film noir royalty: Victor Mature (Kiss of Death, 1947; Gambling House, 1951; The Las Vegas Story, 1952); Lee Marvin (The Big Heat, 1953; Bad Day at Black Rock, 1955; Not as a Stranger, 1955; I Died a Thousand Times, 1955; Shack Out on 101, 1955; The Killers, 1964 – the movie in which Marvin gets to punch Ronald Reagan in the face – it was Reagan’s final film before entering politics), Ernest Borgnine (The Mob, 1951; Bad Day at Black Rock; The Square Jungle, 1955), Richard Egan (The Damned Don’t Cry, 1950; The Killer That Stalked New York, 1950; Undercover Girl, 1950; Highway 301, 1950; The Devil Makes Three, 1952; Split Second, 1953; Wicked Woman, 1953), J. Carrol Naish (The Whistler, 1944; Enter Arsene Lupin, 1944; Black Hand, 1950; Clash By Night, 1952; New York Confidential, 1955; The Young Don’t Cry, 1957; Stephen McNally (Bewitched, 1945; Criss Cross, 1949; City Across the River, 1949; The Lady Gambles, 1949; Winchester 73 – a great Western film noir; No Way Out, 1950; Iron Man – no, not that Iron Man – 1951; The Raging Tide, 1951; Diplomatic Courier, 1952; Split Second, 1953; Make Haste to Live, 1954; The Fiend Who Walked the West – another Western film noir, this one based on the 1947 film noir Kiss of Death;  Brad Dexter (The Asphalt Jungle, 1950; The Las Vegas Story, 1952; Macao, 1952; 99 River Street, 1953; House of Bamboo, 1955; Sylvia Sidney (Sabotage, 1936; Fury, 1936; You Only Love Once, 1937; Mr. Ace, 1946; Behind the High Wall, 1956).

So, plenty of film noir talent at hand. That counts for something, right?

Plus, It’s shot in gorgeous, glorious DeLuxe color. I’ve seen mention of it being in Technicolor, but, no, it was shot in the one-strip Eastman Kodak system known as Color by DeLuxe, rather than the three-strip Technicolor process.

But the curious thing for me, a longtime film noir fan, I’ve never heard of this 1955 movie. I think there’s a reason.

There was something sappy in the air in the middle of the 1950s. A year after this movie was released, the ultimate soap opera novel Peyton Place was released, followed by the movie version the next year. America wanted soap operas, and Twentieth-Century Fox obviously wanted to comply with this combination of 1940s film noir with 1950s soap opera.

But thank you Criterion Channel for presenting Violent Saturday in this collection of noir melodrama. It’s beautiful and awful at the same time.

The film noir elements are beautiful. Much of the filming is beautiful to look at. But when it dips into melodrama, yikes, It goes all the way, and that way is sappy, soapy and gaggable in its simplistic formulae.

Beginning with Victor Mature’s son, (played by Billy Chapin, who also played the lead role in Charles Laughton’s beautiful The Night of the Hunter the same year) who gets into a fight at school because the other boy’s daddy was at Iwo Jima and Victor had to stay behind to run the family copper mine in Bradenville, Arizona.

Guess whose car the bank robbers commandeer in order to give Mr. Mature the opportunity to prove to his son and the world that he is not a coward? Yes, it is that sappy in its soap operaticness.

Richard Egan’s character – mine owner and richest man in town – is driven to perpetual drunkenness by his unfaithful wife. Here’s one of her lines to him: “We can’t change. Not us. You’re an alcoholic and I’m a tramp.”

With a patch of pubic hair glued to the side of his face and chin, Ernest Borgnine is patriarch of an Amish farm family the bank robbers decide to terrorize by making the farm their post-robbery hideout.

Need I go on with the many sidebar stories in this multi-faceted soap operatic melodrama? There are many.

Yet, Violent Saturday has all the hallmarks of a great film noir – a gang of bank robbers descends on a small town, scoping it out before the dastardly deed.

The trio of bank robbers are the most interesting characters, only because they do not descend into the melodrama of the rest of the cast. Those three are in pure film noir mode the entire time.

While the townfolk are mired in melodrama, the gang waits for the moment to pounce on the bank, just before noon Saturday.

The audience first meets Lee Marvin aboard a train with an amphetamine-laden nasal inhaler deep in his nose.

We are introduced to the bank robbers aboard a train on the way to the small town bank they plan to rob. When we first meet Lee Marvin’s character, he has a nasal inhaler stuffed up his nose. You kinda had to be in the know to know what that meant. Back in the 1950s, nasal inhalers contained either one of two amphetamines – benzedrine (or its replacement, benzedrex) or tuamine.

Knowing that Marvin’s constant inhaler use is fueling his amphetamine rush and addiction adds even more of an edge to the edgy character Marvin creates. And that is why he is so special – his characters are always edgy.

Marvin continues the character of messed up creep that he portrayed so well two years earlier in Frtiz Lang’s The Big Heat, in which he throws hot coffee into the beautiful face of insolent girlfriend Gloria Grahame.

There’s a great scene in Violent Saturday with Marvin standing on the sidewalk while his partner is inside the bank, casing it for their robbery.

Marvin is about to shove the inhaler up his nose again when a boy comes running around the corner, bumps into Marvin’s arm, which makes him drop the inhaler. The boy politely stoops to pick up the inhaler when Marvin steps on the boy’s hand and then rubs it into the sidewalk with his foot.

The kid protests and Marvin gives the boy pieces of candy and says, “Shove those in your kisser sonny and go back there and suck on them.”

That’s pure Marvin in the film noir section of Violent Saturday.