Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Marty
1955 · Delbert Mann · Marty on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen for how often Marty and Angie repeat the same question. (sound)
What do you feel like doing tonight comes back and back. Paddy Chayefsky writes talk that circles, stalls and repeats itself. Alan Crosland Jr. lets the emptiness hang instead of cutting for momentum.
Payoff: The loop is not a lull before the scene starts. It is the scene, and most of their week. In the reading: dead time (temps mort). The reading calls this dead time: stretches another film would trim, held here because the emptiness is the thing being told.
Watch how Ernest Borgnine stands and carries his shoulders. (performance)
He shambles. He apologizes with his body before he speaks. He takes up the space of a man who has decided he deserves little. Borgnine had been cast as brutes until this part.
Payoff: His posture tells you his whole position in the neighborhood before any line of dialogue does. In the reading: cinema of the body. The reading calls this a cinema of the body: an ordinary stance holding more truth than any action would.
Notice how flat and unflattering the light on faces is. (light)
Joseph LaShelle shoots in plain available-looking light, in black and white, on real Bronx and Manhattan streets cut in with studio rooms. Nobody is glamorized. Faces are allowed to look ordinary.
Payoff: The studios were chasing CinemaScope in 1955. Mann spends nothing on gloss and everything on letting a plain face be looked at.
Look at how crowded the kitchen and the bar are. (staging)
Mann blocks scenes inside small ordinary rooms carried over from live television: the family kitchen, the butcher counter, the bar, the ballroom. People and routines press in on Marty from every side.
Payoff: The pressure to marry is not only spoken. It is arranged around him physically in every room he enters.
Follow the bachelors deciding where to go on Saturday night. (structure)
The men loiter, negotiate which bar, and try to fill a night that will not fill. The motion goes nowhere. The film gives it as much screen time as any event.
Payoff: The wandering is the portrait. A trip here changes nothing, and that is precisely what you are being shown. In the reading: the voyage/balade form. The reading calls this the stroll form: a journey that transforms nothing, aimless motion standing in for a stalled life.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the corner where Marty and Angie stall. The loop never breaks, and the not-breaking is the film.