Marty / The Catered Affair

MARTY, 1955, MGM Repertory, 91 min. Director Delbert Mann and writer Paddy Chayefsky expanded their earlier, award-winning NBC TV drama into this equally acclaimed feature film. Ernest Borgnine delivers an Oscar-winning performance (in the role originally played by Rod Steiger), as a blue-collar Bronx butcher who finds love late in life with schoolteacher Betsy Blair.

THE CATERED AFFAIR, 1956, Warner Bros., 92 min. Ernest Borgnine is a middle-aged New York cabbie scraping for years to save for his own cab. When his daughter (Debbie Reynolds) announces that she is going to marry in a simple ceremony, domineering wife Bette Davis insists on a planning a wedding well beyond the working-class family's means, to impress their friends and family and to make up for what she never had. Director Richard Brooks and screenwriter Gore Vidal bring Paddy Chayefsky's story to the screen with sensitivity and intelligence.