TFTP On This Day: "Marty" on "Philco-Goodyear Playhouse" from NBC (May 24, 1953)

Posted to Internet Archive by user 'zigoto'
Length - 50:54

It Was 65 Years Ago Today: "Marty" is one of the most-celebrated programs of the live-drama era of early television (sometimes referred to as the "Golden Age" of TV). In the mid-1950s, for a period of approximately five years, before filmed TV programs made largely in Hollywood had taken over network TV schedules, live dramatic TV plays, presented anthology-style from New York, were a celebrated mainstay of American television. And this period was kicked off by "Marty", which originally aired 65 years ago today, on May 24, 1953.

"Marty" aired on the "Philco-Goodyear Playhouse", one of many live anthology shows on the networks throughout the Fifties. It was written by Paddy Chayefsky, who would go on to a celebrated TV and film writing career, directed by Delbert Mann, and produced by Fred Coe, one of the leaders of the live TV drama movement. Marty is played by Rod Steiger, who also would go on to a celebrated career, and the woman Marty meets (referred to only as "the Girl") is played by Nancy Marchand.

Marty is a bachelor who lives with his mother, works as a butcher, and has begun to settle for a life of loneliness as he approaches middle age. He is convinced that women are uninterested in him and that he is (as he calls himself) a "fat, ugly little man". This changes when he meets the Girl at a "lonely hearts" dance hall, and by the end of the hour-long drama they seem to have a glimmer of a chance at a happy relationship together.

There were several things that made "Marty" so groundbreaking in 1953. One was simply the raw acting talent of Rod Steiger; he would go on to lend that talent to such landmark films as "On the Waterfront" (1954), "The Pawnbroker" (1964), and "In the Heat of the Night" (1967), and to become a leading practitioner of "the Method". Another was Chayefsky's writing that dramatized mundane yet inherently dramatic events in the lives of regular people; the play was lauded for the way that it utilized dialogue that seemed like everyday conversation. The story of "Marty" was celebrated by 1950s culture, and it became an Oscar-winning story when adapted to film in 1955.