  (1955) Mid-50s Small Town America: Stephen McNally and his gang,
soft-spoken J. Carrol Naish and Lee Marvin (obviously having a ball as
he stomps on a small boy’s hand and alternates between cigarettes and
a nasal inhaler), wear hats, coats and ties as they stalk off to that weekend bank job. But then
the townspeople already have problems: mine boss’s son Richard Egan is hitting the booze
because his wife is dallying with the country club Casanova; proper librarian Sylvia Sidney resorts to purse
snatching to pay off the bank; bank boss Tommy Noonan proves to be a Peeping Tom in private life ("You know what you are, Roy? You're a drooler."); and engineer Victor Mature has to explain to his son why he didn’t see action in Iwo Jima. Sun-splashed Noir
from masters of the genre Sidney Boehm (scripter of The Big Heat, Rogue Cop, Black Tuesday, etc., etc.)
and Richard Fleischer (fresh from Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but also director of essential
Noirs The Clay Pigeon, Armored Car Robbery, The Narrow Margin, and others), shot in the blazing colors of
early CinemaScope at the open pit mines and on the surprisingly narrow streets of Bisbee, Arizona, all
leading up to a showdown of hard-hitting violence. With the usually menacing Ernest Borgnine as a gentle
Amish farmer.
Original Stereophonic Soundtrack in Dolby SR!
"THE REIGNING KING OF SOUTHWESTERN NOIR… Director Richard Fleischer, an ace with the long frame, composes scrolling studies in horizontality, grabbing one of the most ravishing train shots in cinema. Everything keeps swirling inexorably toward the zero-hour heist, thanks to scriptwriter Sydney Boehm… The cast is a museum exhibit on the nigh-extinct art of scaled-in American bit acting, with the magnificent Sylvia Sidney as the daughter of a prominent family brought low, her flashing pridefulness intact, and Tommy Noonan as a peeping poltroon."
– Nick Pinkerton, The Village Voice. Click here to read review
"PACKED WITH TWISTS AND SURPRISES. Marvin proves most unsettling as a hard guy who’s always snorting from an inhaler (it’s psychosomatic: he once had a wife with a perpetual cold). Mature, with his stricken manliness, reminds you of why James Agee thought he would be perfect as Diomed in Troilus and Cressida."
– Michael Sragow, The New Yorker
"FLEISCHER'S PIVOTAL FILM... He turns the centrifugal storytelling into the motor for any number of tracking and sliding sequence shots, concentric circles turning within each other. Violent Saturday is a remodeling operation, a modernizing, abstracting, and reshaping of noir- and not only through its lengthened horizon. It is not drenched in shadows, but they are a significant and visually defining feature- from the band of shade under the brim of Marvin's hat that obscures his face, to the shadows that give weight and depth to space when the crooks case the town. The film's 'Bradenville'- part Bisbee, part studio set-is stylized but not stereotyped, with a depth and compositional care one could call painterly. Think of Edward Hopper. Violent Saturday is an artifical reality transfixed and transformed by light."
– Richard Combs, Film Comment (January/February 2008)
"Violent Saturday, which will play in a dazzling new print at Film Forum beginning next Friday, is a pulpy pictorial symphony of frames within frames, foreground-to-background dynamism, and razor-sharp couplings of faces."
– Bruce Bennett, The New York Sun. Click here to read feature |
"Much like Dog Day Afternoon did two decades later, Violent Saturday gives the bank robbery an ensemble touch… the payoff makes it worth the wait… As an exciting pulp story with a profound center, it manages to break all the rules."
– Eric Kohn, New York Press
“An excellent example of Fleischer’s work with tough actors and his use of wide screen and
a fine sense of pace and atmosphere.”
– The Guardian (London).
“A bank job movie that takes place in the
widescreen DeLuxe Color burning light of the Southwest noonday sun, without a shadow in sight. Any
movie which features Mature, Borgnine and Marvin has to be some kind of primer in slobdom; hero Mature
soon becomes marginal when up against Marvin’s minimal performance as a loose-lipped killer with a
permanent head cold. Growling that women and children ‘make me nervous,’ he can make his continual
inhalation of benzedrine look like deep degeneracy.”
– Time Out (London)
"If one can imagine Robert Wise as the 1960s American film equivalent of the Beatles, then Fleischer was the Rolling Stones. Simultaneously innovative and classicist, the Brooklyn native brought a risky darkness and verve to middle-of-the-road American picture making that, if it didn't earn him critical accolades, certainly sold barge-loads of tickets and inspired two generations of filmmakers."
– Bruce Bennett, The New York Sun
"Just might be Fleischer's best noir; it's certainly his most expansive… Twin Peaks has nothing on this town."
– Ken Fox, TV Guide
"With the possible exception of The Narrow Margin, this is Richard Fleischer's best film, and seeing it on a big screen confirmed that opinion… Great, nasty fun, and you have to love a movie in which Lee Marvin deliberately steps on a ten-year-old's hand and J. Carroll Naish hands another tot a handful of candies and tells him, 'Now go over there, stick those in your kisser and suck on 'em.'"
– George Robinson, Cine-Journal |
A CRITERION PICTURES RELEASE OF A TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM.
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