Violent Saturday

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 ****

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.

The wide-screen format was at most only two years old when this film was made. Yet, Charles G. Clarke's shot composition in the new wide-screen format is beautiful. This alone makes the film worth watching.

This is a good example of a color film noir; perhaps not as good as Niagara (1953) or Leave her to Heaven (1945), which were made by the same studio by the way (20th Century Fox), but still a good example from the noir cycle in color.

One way to understand film noir is that it is simply violent melodrama. Look at The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) for example. Violent Saturday (1955) is steeped in melodrama, but there is also some extraordinary violence. And the violence here--in typical noir fashion--is the resolution--however bleak--to some of the melodramatic conflict.

The film has a profound cynicism grinding beneath the surface of the beautiful color photography. And this cynicism remains at the end of the film.

If you haven't seen this film and you are interested in film noir or film of this period, then I would highly recommend the 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.

There are 50+ IMDb reviews already, so I'll try to make this brief and succinct.

The first 55 minutes is a melodramatic soap opera that's borderline boring. This section gets 4 out of 10. The remainder is a thrill ride that gives the film its title. This section gets 8 out 10. Averaged out, this motion picture gets 6 out of 10.

Several reviewers take issue with the casting. I had no problem with it. Everyone does a decent, or above decent, job at acting. I could feel that they cared about their roles and were professional, carrying out the director's and producers' visions.

Considering the decade/century in which it was made, this film's violence is quite shocking. Apparently, critics took issue with this fact. By today's standards, it's no more than a PG rating.