What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1955

The Year: 1955
What the Nominees Were: Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, Marty, Mister Roberts, Picnic, The Rose Tattoo 

Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: In America, Night of the Hunter and Kiss Me Deadly were too bleak for the Academy. Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly took a darker turn with It’s Always Fair Weather, John Sturges denounced racism in the gritty little thriller Bad Day at Black Rock, and Nicholas Ray gave us James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Overseas, this became the first year in which foreign films, as a whole, began to surpass the quality of Hollywood fare. In Sweden, Ingmar Bergman turned out his first masterpiece, Smiles on a Summer Night. In India, Satyajit Ray burst onto the scene with Pather Panchali, and in France the “French Hitchcock,” H. G. Clouzot, made Diabolique.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: Marty
How Hard Was the Decision: Extremely hard. Marty is frequently cited as one of the weakest Oscar winners, and indeed one does wonder while watching it if this is a movie anyone would remember today if it hadn’t won. …But there were no stronger options. I considered these three to overturn it:

• Rebel Without a Cause sizzles with a white-hot star turn from Dean, but it’s a little too overwrought and dated in its “juvenile delinquency” theme
• Bad Day at Black Rock is magnificent but equally small and doesn’t feel any more like an Oscar film than Marty
• As for It’s Always Fair Weather, I passed over Singing in the Rain and so considered giving one to this follow-up, which I prefer, but this movie is just too damn odd for Oscar

But what about the smorgasbord of excellent foreign films? I decided that none of them could have won, and certainly none of them got any nominations, despite being among the best of all time. So that left Marty, a movie I have a stubborn affection for.

Director: Delbert Mann
Writer: Paddy Chayefsky
Stars: Ernest Borgnine and Betsy Blair

The Story: A mopey butcher, self-described as “stocky,” is under pressure to get married after his final younger sibling is married off. He has no luck at a ballroom until he sees a plain-jane schoolteacher named Clara get ditched and swoops in to offer some sympathy. They talk all night, then he takes her home and drops her off. The next day, he has to decide whether or not to call her.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It won Picture, Director, Actor and Screenplay. It lost Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Art Direction and Cinematography
How It Won: It certainly was considered a shocking win at the time, being such a small movie, remade and barely expanded from a teleplay (starring Rod Steiger in the lead) that had aired a few years before. The movie’s co-producer, Burt Lancaster, no stranger to big swings, leapt into action when the movie started getting Oscar talk, launching the first Oscar campaign that ever outspent the movie itself ($400k vs $340k) and it worked.

Why It Won:

1. Movies had discovered widescreen and color had roared back into style, so how did this barely-different-from-TV movie stand out? Moviegoers sometimes, especially in times of bombast, crave the shock of verisimilitude. Startlingly humdrum dialogue (“I dunno, what do you wanna do tonight?” is repeated many times), documentary-style filming on the streets of New York, a low stakes finale. Sometimes we just want to say, “This is real.”
   
2. Society shifts back and forth on its opinion of supposedly “nice guys” who can’t find love. In 2025, they’re widely despised as merely creeps in disguise, but this movie takes a more sympathetic view. That said, Marty is certainly far from blameless in his loneliness. He keeps unintentionally calling Clara a “dog,” oblivious to the hurt it’s causing her. We (and he) can tell he’s falling in love because he keeps talking about himself uncontrollably and forgetting to ask about her, which is a nicely ironic way to show it.
3. The movie prefigures Scorsese in its faithful recreation of lower-class Italian-American men hanging out shooting the breeze. The funniest discussion is of the supposedly monumental literary powers of Mickey Spillaine.
   
4. Betsy Blair is great as Clara. My favorite line reading is when Marty takes her back to his house and says “This is the kitchen,” and she responds “Yes, I know,” a line that sounds derisive on paper, but she manages to deliver it as mostly vulnerable but slightly amused at the same time.
   

Ah, 1955: I’m not even going to ask what the “S” stands for