54. Marty

by Joel Bocko

“I think of this as a great rainy afternoon movie. You’re flipping through the channels on one of those great lazy Saturdays…it’s summer but it’s raining outdoors and you’re stuck inside. You come across a classic movie channel (AMC, TCM–take your pick) and pause. What’s this? Ernest Borgnine? You always like him, why not stop for a moment and watch. It looks like it’s just beginning. ‘Marty’? Yeah, you’ve heard of it, vaguely. Won the Oscar or something, but it’s been kind of forgotten. So you start watching and before long you’re totally enchanted, completely charmed, by the simple story and realistic characters. Who can’t sympathize with Borgnine’s sensitive butcher, hanging out with his Italian friends and their goofy conversations about Mickey Spillane, all the while pining away with his heart of gold for a girl that his buddies call a ‘dog’? The conversations have the kind of natural humor and warmth that remind you of the old days hanging out with your pals. As you watch the movie, you find yourself enthralled and you never change the channel, watching it till the end, realizing that you’ve seen this plot riffed on and spoofed on various TV shows, films, and cartoons over the years. When the movie’s done, you’re really excited–this is one of those films you discovered on your own and nothing can beat that thrill.

“Now, this isn’t the way I saw ‘Marty’–I rented it and now own it on DVD–but it’s the spirit I get from it. I love the conversation between Marty and his best friend, its street poetry that’s entertaining without being false, in the diner as their Friday night lays out ahead of them. I love Marty and Clara’s walk, their honesty and his enthusiasm; you worry is he going too far, being too gregarious for the shy Clara? Will it work? I love the preparations for Sunday Mass, the fight between the married couple, and Marty agonizing over standing up his girl while his friends have an amusingly banal and silly conversation in which they keep repeating themselves. It’s really just a charming and wonderful film, joyful even in its sad moments. If you don’t enjoy it, what can I say, but my recommendation comes completely honest and from the heart. This is one of those personal favorites that also happens to be an underrated classic–but just underrated enough so that the joy of discovering it on a rainy Saturday afternoon remains undiluted.” – Me, April 24, 2003, my first online review (IMDb)

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JACQUES DEMY’S A SLIGHTLY PREGNANT MAN “Never think for too long”

 © 2014 by James Clark

 

      I notice that, in an interview with Slant Magazine, filmmaker, Jonathan Glazer, claims not to have seen Her. Also, he says, “I’m very bad at detecting themes in my work… I suppose it’s [the affinity between Her and Under the Skin] in the air or something…” This, hardly unique to him, penchant for misrepresentation brings us to some necessary infill, perhaps, though, especially pressing in the task of charting where Glazer’s films go and where that leaves us. Disclaimers aside, the three feature films he has brought forward over the past fourteen years are discernibly steeped in strivings central to a filmic avant-garde, as rooted in a wider showdown with conventional rationalist securements. Equivocation is “in the air” and we have to care enough to get a handle on its roots and the kind of fruition being allowed to see the light of day.

We’re starting in this seemingly odd way, to address A Slightly Pregnant Man (1973), because we have also in our sightline Glazer’s Birth (2004), which might well be called A Slightly Reincarnated Man. Glazer hopes to keep the general public happy with the notion that he’s simply a not particularly unusual craftsman of arcane cinematic images which he himself cannot comprehend and which trigger musings that the viewer plays for days to come. That kind of transaction is right up the alley of consumers of rock concerts and TV ads (rock and product filming being a big part of his professional career). It benefits, over and above its monetary rewards, from being an outburst unimpeachable in its variable intimations. As a spokesman for his feature films, he looks to that vein so useful in popular entertainment to disarm those possibly alarmed by brash unconventionality. He’s offering, he’d like us to believe, no more than a sensuous tingle from which we can and should bail out at any time it proves discomfiting. For all its corporate savvy, that gambit is seriously questionable. Interviewers and enthusiasts positively struck, as they should be, by the multiple assets of the three features to date, are dismayingly ready to imagine that the highly complex discursive narratives are tantamount to short-loop, gallery-bound video art—optical   and aural tone poems. But the films as such, though aptly felt to amount to problematic suspense, are built like a Swiss watch, delivering an undertow expertly laced with avant-garde consequentiality. That is to say, a degree of friction obtains here, intrinsic to the phenomena being traversed. (I doubt that in his early days as a director of stage plays he’d have been so loath to admit he knew something about the history of his art, as distinct from the technical craft. Glazer’s rather incongruous approval of the work of the great stylist, Stanley Kubrick, has faked many of those viewers who want to believe that it always comes down to the gratifying variety of humankind as established several thousand years ago.)

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