Violent Saturday **** (1955, Richard Egan, Victor Mature, Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine) – Classic Movie Review 1700

Director Richard Fleischer’s exciting, high-impact, high-anxiety 1955 suspense thriller focuses on the fallout of a vicious bank heist on a small town community in Arizona. A gang of hoodlums (Stephen McNally, Lee Marvin, J Carrol Naish) decides to rob the local bank on the upcoming Saturday and three men case the situation carefully, but the peaceful start to the weekend turns into a violent turns violent Saturday.

McNally plays bank robber Harper, who arrives in town posing as a travelling salesman, where he’s joined by Marvin’s sadistic Benzedrine addict Dill and Naish’s bookish Chapman.

Early on, Sidney Boehm’s tough-toned, vigorous screenplay, based on a novel by William L Heath, wanders about a bit to sketch in the quirky stories of many of the townspeople (one of them a timid clerk who is a peeping tom by night), but it soon starts to bite, and move briskly. And a powerful cast helps to keep the story tense and engrossing, while director Fleischer handles the movie in imaginative, inventive style, piling on the tension.

Cinematographer Charles G Clarke delivers some eye-catching widescreen images in CinemaScope and, surprisingly, for a noir-type movie, colour (De Luxe color). Apart from the meandering build-up, it’s a sharp movie, and a short one, running a compact 90 minutes.

Among the great tough-guy cast, Lee Marvin enjoys himself as Dill, the sadistic one of the gangsters who grinds a little boy’s hand into the ground and Ernest Borgnine is effective in a less showy role as Stadt, an Amish farmer, who has his big moment when he’s eventually provoked into using a pitchfork on Marvin. It is the first of seven movies the two actors made together, including The Dirty Dozen.

Victor Mature, Richard Egan and Stephen McNally are the main stars, but they are not nearly as interesting as these two actors. Sylvia Sidney, Virginia Leith, Tommy Noonan (as the Bank Manager), Margaret Hayes, J Carrol Naish and Brad Dexter also star.

The film was shot in Bisbee, Arizona, as well as in Utah near the Bingham Canyon mine, now owned by Kennecott Copper. 

Despite its very tough tone for a 50s movie, it was a regular on British TV on Saturday afternoons.

The great Ernest Borgnine died on July 8 2012, aged 95. He worked right to the end, making over 200 movies.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1700

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