“Whaddya feel like doin’ tonight?” “I dunno, Angie. Whaddya feel like doin?” “I don’t know. Whadaya feel like doin’?” Those lines could only be from one film, Marty (1955). The story of the shy and lonely, 34-year-old, Italian-American, Marty Piletti (Ernest Borgnine), a butcher who lives with his widowed mother (Esther Minciotti) in the Bronx.
There have been many films about lonely people trying to find someone to love and marry. So why has this film’s emotional power, set in an Italian-American neighborhood of the 1950s, lasted for almost 70 years? It has no big names; no fancy camera work; no epic music. It’s a Saturday night and Marty and his friend, Angie, are just trying to figure out “Whaddya feel like doin?”
I believe because both Ernest Borgnine and Esther Minciotti were literally born to play these roles. And as such, they created performances that are modest, little masterpieces, forever preserved in black-and-white for the rest of us to enjoy.
Marty is a man who has all but given up on himself, believing he’s too old and ugly for any woman to love. His mother encourages him to the point of harassment, “You gonna die without a son!” to go to the Stardust Ballroom and try one more time to meet someone. And, under the man-made glow of the mirrored dance ball, Marty does meet someone: Clara (Betsy Blair), a shy school teacher who’s as lonely as he.
Borgnine was born Ermes Effron Borgnino in Hamden, Connecticut. A child of Italian immigrants, he learned to speak Italian before English. And, he was always very close to his own mother. He even gave her the credit for encouraging him to try acting following his discharge after ten years in the Navy. A career path he had never considered. But, just like Marty, Ernie listened to his mother. And, amazingly enough, ten years after that, Grace Kelly was handing Borgnine the Academy Award as Best Actor for Marty!
Esther Minciotti was born Pasqua Cunico into a theatre family from Turin, Italy, immigrating with them to the United States in 1894. She married fellow Italian actor, Silvio Minciotti, in 1911. The two acted together throughout America’s Little Italy theatre circuit and even on Broadway. Esther broke into Hollywood films in the late 1940s. A supporting actress, always playing the mother. In Marty, her dress? My grandmother had one just like it. The way Minciotti wears her hair, her manner of moving, speaking, it’s all so completely authentic, so true to the Italian-born mothers & grandmothers of that era that you forget she’s acting!
To me, this authenticity adds to the feel that, over time, this film has become somewhat of documentary versus a fictional, romantic drama. A simple record of men and women existing in their socially and culturally defined, narrow, separate worlds. A patriarchy existing only because of its strong matriarchy.
The Italian culture as portrayed in Marty sensitively shows mothers who live in big, old homes, struggling to understand where they suddenly find themselves in life. A world where the specter of death seems to hover, as does the belief in curses like the ‘evil eye.’ Everyone goes to church, and mother and son gather at the table for all important discussions. Here, the weight of familial responsibility, love, sacrifice, along with the ties that bind, which can sometimes suffocate, are on full display.
Borgnine portrayed Marty with a physicality that revealed more about the character than words ever could. I defy anyone to watch his performance and not get a lump in their throat. Watch as he awkwardly practices a few steps before asking a woman to dance; or as he slowly closes his eyes when he can no longer stand the pain of rejection; and to me, the most poignant moment of all, the hug that follows the small, tentative kiss between he and Clara. Marty’s hug is like that of a drowning man who’s just been tossed a life preserver.
Sadly, the support Marty has so dutifully given to friends and family over the years is sorely lacking in return, making his and Clara’s first, awkward steps towards each other, all the more difficult.
And that’s part of the Italian-American experience, too.
Much is made of the ‘family’ in Italian-American culture, film, literature – life. Marty shows all the shades of good, bad, support, betrayal, change and rigidity that a family can embody. But, my guess is that Marty’s world didn’t implode just because he finally put himself first; finally found love and a future with Clara. His friends and family, I’m sure, adjusted and evolved. And those that really cared about him, learned to be happy for him. That’s what the best kind of ‘famiglie’ do, adjust and evolve, keep going – and stay close!
