Review: Violent Saturday

The goings on amongst the populous of a small town just prior to an intended bank robbery by Stephen McNally and his associates Lee Marvin and J. Carrol Naish. Victor Mature is the dutiful husband and father whose son doesn’t see him as a hero because he had to run the mining company whilst everyone else went off to war. Richard Egan (out of his depth) is the rich drunk married to an open-legged Margaret Hayes, Tommy Noonan is a milquetoast bank manager who moonlights as a Peeping Tom, Sylvia Sydney is a Klepto librarian (!), Virginia Leith is the nurse Noonan spies on and who throws herself at married Egan, and Ernest Borgnine plays a simple Amish farmer unwittingly drawn into the situation when the crooks seek refuge at his farm.

 

Bizarre, sometimes awful, but compellingly strange 1955 Richard Fleischer (“The Vikings” and “Fantastic Voyage” are favourites of mine) film is really two B-films in one, and one is better than the other by a country mile. The first, a soapie melodrama gives us stock characters who are eventually going to be involved in what I call the second film, which is a crime/heist film wherein we are supposed to wonder which of the characters will live and who will die. I didn’t care, because most of these characters were unlikeable, lived boring soap opera lives, and were often performed by the actors with such excruciating badness at times (Hello, Richard Egan and Tommy Noonan, in two especially hideous performances), that one has to wonder if Fleischer weren’t the world’s first schizophrenic filmmaker. The heist scenes are so well-done and tense, and the actors portraying the villains are so impressive, that it’s a shame the amount of time we spend with them is so much lesser than the time we spend with the ‘victims’. Marvin, as usual, is the kid-kicking standout, though McNally’s solid as a rock and the film works perfectly when these two, or Naish, are on screen.

 

Of said victims, Mature comes off best, mostly due to him having the largest role, though the ending regarding his character is truly appalling (even more appalling is how Noonan’s character is treated in the end). Borgnine, meanwhile, is as Borgnine always is (God love him!), but cast as a peace-loving Amish guy...I probably don’t need to tell you how that works out for Mr. Borgnine. Suffice to say he’s still likeable in the role (And you just know that whole ‘I Thank Thee, Neighbour’ crap is gonna be discarded at some point as he’s called to get medieval on some crooks arses!).

 

Scripted by Sydney Boehm (the excellent crime flick “The Big Heat”), from the novel by William L. Heath, it’s overall strange enough to warrant a viewing at least but there’s no way I could say that it’s any good in the conventional sense. It’s too uneven.

 

Rating: C+