Violent Saturday

Three hoodlums plot to rob a bank in a small town. But the town has secrets of its own: The bank president is a Peeping Tom. The librarian is a petty thief. The son of the strip-mine owner is an alcoholic; his wife is openly carrying on an affair with the local golf pro. The son of the strip-mine foreman is ashamed of him because he didn't fight in Word War II. The strip-mine nurse is the object of several men's sexual fantasies.

With a great tough guy turn by Lee Marvin as one of the bank robbers, alternately sniffing an inhaler and stomping on kids' fingers, and Ernest Borgnine as an Amish farmer (!) who isn't completely pacifistic. (Inspiration for WITNESS?) The strip-mining is a wonderful metaphor for the secrets that lurk just underneath the surface of a seemingly placid small town. Would be good on a double bill with BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK.

Thanks to FXM we can now see the widescreen version of Violent Saturday. Its a terrific, tense crime drama that must have been somewhat controversial in 1955. Certainly the onscreen violence is stronger than anything else I've seen from the period, except possibly Richard Widmark shoving the wheelchair down the stairs in Kiss of Death. There are definitely some hints of the future Hollywood of Sam Peckinpah--the sadistic Lee Marvin grinding a little boys hand into the ground, and a bearded Ernest Borgnine using a pitchfork on Lee towards the end of the film. Well worth catching.

The town of Bradenville is in for a Violent Saturday because three men, Stephen McNally, Lee Marvin, and J. Carrol Naish have come to town to rob their bank. McNally is the brains of the trio and for any number of reasons including the town's isolation, small police force, and the fact that the bank is open on Saturday until noon have made him determine this is the place for a stickup. He's even got a fourth guy Richey Murray staked out at an Amish farm holding the farmer Enest Borgnine and his family hostage, picked because of its isolation and the fact they have no electricity or modern communication to send up an alarm.

But this is some town Bradenville, while we see the bank robbers carefully timing out their job, we also get a glimpse of Bradenville's citizenry. Quite a little Peyton Place that town is.

Richard Fleischer as director managed to skilfully combine a soap opera and a crime caper film and it works. The script is very tight, not one frame of film is wasted. We get any number of interesting side stories in the 90 minute time of the film that do not detract in any way from the caper portion.

Victor Mature is the nominal hero of the piece, he gets carjacked and kidnapped, but proves to be a bit more than the robbers can handle. Ernest Borgnine stands out in the cast as the Amish father who has to question the pacifist tenets of his faith to protect his home and family.

A little bit of noir, a little bit of soap opera mixed very well in a good thriller of a film in Violent Saturday.

This is a gem, an excellent little picture, smart and menacing. If you're a fan of '50's pictures, particularly crime melodramas then this is a must-see. The plot is simple. A small town is visited by three hoods (Stephen McNally,Lee Marvin,J.Carroll Naish) intent on holding up the bank. The film revolves around their plans and folowing the lives of the townsfolk, who, oblivious to the villains in their midst, go about their mundane, everyday problematic lives until the saturday the two worlds collide. Richard Fleischer made an excellent job of this potboiler,which manages to sustain the tension managed in more celebrated films(High Noon) as the villains arrange their plot to rob the town. There's a stellar cast on display, McNally, Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Sylvia Sidney and even the normally lifeless performances given by the film's principal, Victor Mature, doesn't happen in this case. It's shot in terrific colour and has a genuine air of small town claustrophobia and menace. Check it out.

Combination crime-drama and soap opera, presumably a contract picture from Fox with many familiar faces (and Ernest Borgnine inexplicably cast as an Amish farmer!), turns out to be a pretty exciting movie. Three hoods plot to stick up a small town bank; meanwhile, hormones are boiling over at the new copper plant where the foreman's son is drinking himself into a stupor while his cheating wife runs around on the golf course ("You're an alcoholic," she tells him, "and I'm a tramp!"). There's also a married banker who lusts after a shapely nurse, a librarian with sticky fingers, and Victor Mature as a graduate whose oldest child is ashamed that his father never served his country. Director Richard Fleischer sets up the pieces of this story almost sluggishly, yet after about an hour of exposition the plot really starts cooking. There are some strong images here, and vivid cinematography by Charles G. Clarke (with excellent location shooting in Bisbee, Arizona and terrific usage of De Luxe color stock). The ensemble cast works admirably together, no one person upstaging the other; however, crooked Lee Marvin makes a fantastic entrance into town stepping on a child's hand in the street! Gripping, tense, and surprisingly well-written, with Richard Egan getting an emotional monologue at the end about the unfairness of death. An injured Amish child is forgotten about in the rush of excitement, and Borgnine in an Abraham Lincoln beard strains credulity, but the technical aspects and direction of the film are top-notch. *** from ****