Cinema: New Picture, may 16, 1955

Violent Saturday (20th Century-Fox) is a big, rough, savvy sort of pell-meller—perhaps the best thing of its crude kind that Hollywood has offered in 1955. The idea of the picture, trenchantly written by Sydney Boehm and slickly directed by Richard Fleischer, is as simple and as nerve-racking, as a bomb. Three thugs arrive in a small Arizona mining town to hold up the bank. While the robbers prepare their plans, while the bomb ticks away in the mind, the moviegoer stares with itchy horror into the faces and the lives of the innocent bystanders who will be caught in the eventual explosion.

Not all the bystanders are outstandingly innocent. The son (Richard Egan) of the mineowner is an aging squirt who romances the bottle instead of his wife, and makes rye grimaces at the facts of life. The lady herself (Margaret Hayes) is a country-club tramp who indulges in "two or three hobbies a year." The town librarian (Sylvia Sidney) is caught with a stolen purse by the manager of the bank (Tommy Noonan), whose civic indignation is somewhat dampened by the fact that she has caught him, too, in his secret sin (he peeps).

Best of all are the sympathetic insights into the personal problems of a reasonably steady, square-shooting, white-collar criminal (Lee Marvin). The night before the big job the poor fellow cannot sleep. Of course he is afraid, but he is also anxious to impress the boss (Stephen McNally) and get ahead in the underworld. He paces the floor in his hotel room until all hours, sniffing wretchedly at his "Benny" inhaler. This reminds him of a former wife, a party named Parmalee. Few marriages can have suffered so implacable a description as he gives that one, in seven well-chosen words. "Caught better'n 50 colds from that broad," he gravels disconsolately.

The robbery itself is staged with the subtle unreality — in which dreamy calm and awful violence lie, like lion and lamb, impossibly together — that marks the real thing. And the denouement is achieved with a stroke so strong that it makes the rest of the picture seem a little weak. An Amish farmer (Ernest Borgnine), committed by his deepest beliefs to non violence, kills the last of the killers to save the life of an innocent man (Victor Mature). He drives a pitchfork into the brute's back as if he were a bale of hay; and yet as he strikes, his eyes convey the heart-stricken awareness, as his lips express the unshakable determination, of an Abraham commanded by a higher power to destroy a life that is dear to him. In this scene, the morality of violence is brought vividly into question, and the question has seldom been answered with more pith and natural majesty.

With his sensitive performance in Marty, and now in Violent Saturday, Ernest Borgnine, 37, is giving moviegoers a satisfying look at a new facet of a talent hitherto largely devoted to villainous sneers. For an actor who looks like a beer-truck driver (he became an actor only because the refrigeration school he wanted to attend was too far from his New Haven home), the revelation may be just startling enough to launch a new career.