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| 1955 Hardcover First Edition |
- Spoiler Alerts!
Although the 1955 film
starring Victor Mature is better known, W. L. Heath’s novel is a hard-boiled,
neglected masterpiece. The advance word on this novel was strong and caught
Hollywood’s attention from the start. Darryl Zanuck purchased the film rights
before the book was published. There are notable differences between the film
and the book. The novel is tighter, blunt and unrelenting. Set in the Alabama
town of Morgan, a little place seething with atavistic racism, lust and greed. The
book is a series of character studies, broken into sub-chapters as the story
develops. It is a slice of reality, and the dialogue includes frank discussions
on alcoholism and sex. None of the characters are particularly appealing, but
they are all linked to the bank robbery that occurs after three men arrive in
town on Friday. Of these, Shelley Martin is the nicest, although his views on
Asians and Negroes are not unusual for the period and location. His goal for
that weekend is harmless (he wants to go fishing) whereas everyone else in town
has an ulterior motive. These are people who are controlled by their selfish
interests in sex and money. Heath outlines each character’s weakness in detail.
Emily and Boyd Fairbanks are alcoholics and Emily is consistently unfaithful to
Boyd. And Boyd is a drunken wimp. He loves his wife and tolerates her infidelity
because he doesn’t know what to do about it. The banker, Harry Reeves, is a
voyeur. He gets worked up when he sees the new nurse in town, Miss Benson. He
begins the habit of stalking her, and he lurks in the alley at night so that he
can watch her undress through a window. Sexual desire is a reoccurring motif in
the book, and it affects all of the charters both directly and indirectly. In
the novel, Reeves is unredeemable. When he spies Miss Benson coming out of a
five-and-dime “He fed his eyes on the
motion of her hips straining the white poplin skirt as she walked, and the deft
switching back and forth of the hem of her skirt above the seams of her
stockings. It filled him with desire, and he had to look away from time to
time, drawing deep breaths of the hot summer air.” (p. 98) By the
conclusion, after being shot up in the bank, his fate is to lay in the hospital
bed as Miss Benson administers his care, and the sound of the “efficient swishing of her uniform” is
maddening. His fate is to suffer an existential hell of unrequited desire. Other
characters include Sugarfoot, the bellhop in the Commerce Hotel where the
robbers are staying. Sugarfoot is a stereotype. He drinks too much, is nosy,
and discovers the men have a shotgun with them which makes him suspicious. His
failure to act, and to only drink and snoop about, turns his character into
something of a Greek Chorus character. He exists to explain what he sees, but
he has no outward redeeming qualities himself. Shelley Martin is drawn into the
plot when the robbers hijack him for his car. They leave him tied up in a barn,
but he manages to get free. Martin is forced to kill, and the violence of that
Saturday is quick and unblemished. The Robbers also kill in the bank. I found
the conclusion touching, made up almost entirely by dialogue between Martin and
his wife. They had both survived something terrible, and Martin is grateful for
his wife and children. W. L. Heath was a journalist for many years, and his
prose follows the same clipped, journalistic approach that Hemingway used and
made popular. There are no poetic embellishments.
The film takes a
different approach. Violent Saturday
is often described as film noir but
that statement is incorrect. The film is a Cinemascope DeLuxe color movie made
in Bisbee, Arizona. It might best be described as a crime drama, but because of
the location and certain plot elements introduced by screenwriter Sydney Boehm,
Violent Saturday plays like a modern
Western. Where the book’s robbery takes place on a rainy day, the film is
bright and sunny and filled with breathtaking scenery. This is a study in
contrasts; both the film and the novel effectively use identical material but
turn it into something fresh and exciting. Victor Mature plays Martin, and his character
is a veteran of WWII, but his son is upset that his father never won any medals
for heroism like the fathers of other kids. This embellishment saddles Mature
with the notion of proving himself, which he obviously does. The three robbers
are played with appropriate menace by Stephen McNally, Lee Marvin and J. Carrol
Naish. Miss Benson is played with compact sexiness by Virginia Leath, and
Reeves is played superbly by Tommy Noonan. Richard Egan and Margaret Hayes are
excellent as the tortured Fairbanks.’ Hayes has one of the film’s best bits of
dialogue: “You’re an alcoholic and I’m a tramp” which does not appear in the
novel. The script introduces Ernest Borgnine as an Amish farmer. Borgnine and
his family are held captive in the barn with Mature/Martin. This adds a quality
to the film not found in the novel. Martin and the Amish farmer are the two
unblemished, honest characters in the film. By comparison, all of the other
characters are tainted in some way; they are fractured, greedy and sexually
immoral at all levels. Martin and the Amish farmer get their hands dirty by
killing, but their motivation stems from survival rather than greed. Too much
is made of the fact that Victor Mature never gave himself much credit for his
acting ability, yet, in truth, he was always quite good; sincere and capable.
He reminds me here of a beefier version of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo in First Blood. Mature is good, but his
role is secondary. He provides the necessary violent conclusion that everyone
is waiting for. None of the acting is overstated. In fact, Richard Egan avoids
slapstick in those scenes where his character is intoxicated. He plays it straight
and the film is made better by the even keel maintained by the excellent cast. The
location is changed from Morgan, Alabama to Bradenville, a fictional copper
mining town, and while the location is never mentioned, the location scenes
make it clear this is the southwest. Directed by Richard Fleischer, son of Max
Fleischer of the famed Superman animation films, he is also known for directing
the flashy 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
for Disney.
I recommend both the
book and film for those of you that haven’t encountered this story. Violent Saturday is quintessentially
American; at once ugly and disturbing, but occasionally infused with a higher
sense of purpose, like an intoxicating perfume.
