The success of the movie “Marty” has drawn attention to a new luminary in the field of popular drama, Paddy Chayefsky, TV playwright and movie scenarist. The publication of his TV plays in book form (Television Plays, Simon & Schuster, 268 pp., $3.75) has afforded Gerald Whales the opportunity to examine and comment on Chayefsky’s dominant motifs and methods.

_____________

Marty, a quiet little movie about an unprepossessing young man who at last finds a girl, as plain and as lonely as he is, with whom he can share his loneliness, has become a commercial and critical success. In Europe it received a standing ovation and the Golden Palm as the best film at the Cannes International Film Festival this past spring. It even received a favorable notice in Pravda, according to an AP report in the New York Times (May 31,1955), which must be some kind of mark of distinction for a film that, despite its sentimental depiction of the “little man,” is so obviously free of social message. So much acclaim might well make the viewer a little suspicious, but Marty is, in fact, quite a good movie despite a number of minor faults.

Although the acting (there are excellent performances by Ernest Borgnine as Marty and Joseph Mantell as his friend Angie) and Delbert Mann’s direction are partly responsible for the quality of the film, the movie is recognizably the work of Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote the screen play, an extension of his television script. Chayefsky, one of the most successful television dramatists, has recently dignified his profession by publishing a collection of scripts, Television Plays, with extensive notes. A glance at the book and the few Chayefsky scripts the Philco-Goodyear Playhouse has produced since the collection was prepared indicates that Marty is typical of its author’s work in its realistic setting, its lower-middle-class characters, and its domestic stiuation.

Marty, whose last name is Pilletti, is a butcher in a neighborhood shop in the Bronx. His name, his job, his surroundings are Chayefsky identification marks. With the exception of The Big Deal, which takes place in Toledo, although it still sounds like the Bronx, all Chayefsky’s plays take place in or near New York. He was raised in the Bronx and obviously has an ear not only for the speech patterns of New York City, but for the nuances of family life. Sometimes his characters are Italian, as in Marty, sometimes Jewish, as is the author, and sometimes Irish. It makes little difference whether the characters reach for a cup of coffee, a glass of tea, or a drop of whisky, because the essential ingredient is the same. Since Chayefsky deals almost completely in domestic affairs, he must present a group in which a sense of family is still strong even if the particular situation is one in which the family relationship is crippling. For the most part, the stories are interchangeable; for instance. The Catered Affair, a play in which a mother wants to make up for what she thinks has been her neglect of her daughter by giving her an elaborate wedding, would have made as much sense had the family been Jewish instead of Irish. Nor do Chayefsky’s characters go much higher on the social scale than Marty, the butcher. His protagonists have included a taxicab driver, a bookkeeper, a compositor, and once, in a burst of professionalism, a dentist.

_____________

The New York setting is necessary for Chayefsky, as he pointed out in an interview with Vincent Tovell of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (to be presented on the program “Anthology” later this month) because it is a setting that he knows and feels comfortable in. He apparently feels that if he can give a character verisimilitude by identifying the street on which he lives, the theater he attends, the stores at which he shops, he can more easily go on to give him psychological reality. Certainly his scripts contain a great amount of local material. Marty and Clara walk by the RKO Chester when they leave the dance hall in which they meet; Marty and his friends talk about going to Loew’s Paradise or to the burlesque in Union City, or to see what they can pick up on Seventy-second Street. The subway stops are identified in Holiday Song and Catch My Boy on Sunday; the bride-to-be in The Catered Affair meets her girl friend for a sundae at Krum’s, and an inserted shot of the front of the store underlines the accuracy for the local-colorists in the audience.

This kind of actuality is harmless, even amusing to those members of the audience who recognize the plants, so long as it does not become a preoccupation which restricts the characters emotionally as well as geographically to West Farms Road. So far Chayefsky has avoided such insistence, but there are occasional exchanges in Marty which bear too heavily the stamp of the moment.

A more genuine kind of localism, the one for which Chayefsky has been most widely praised, is his command of the Bronx idiom. It is not what his characters have to say, but the intonation, the structure of the sentences, the choice of words and phrases that indicate their origin. For the most part, Chayefsky has sense enough to avoid slang that is too recent to be a bona fide part of the speech pattern. None of the scripts reads as well as it would play, but the lines are there for an actor to bring to life. A playwright who attempts to write down the sounds, unless he knows as much about phonetics as George Bernard Shaw did, is almost certainly going to write dialogue that looks as silly as the stage accents with which Eugene O’Neill burdened plays like The Hairy Ape. Chayefsky could have written like Mr. Dooley, T. A. Daly, or Milt Gross in an attempt to make the reader see the sound of the speeches, but for the most part he avoids that literary pitfall; as it is, there are enough phrases like “oughtta” and “alla way” to make the scripts annoying to read.

The main danger in a fondness for a particular kind of speech is the failure to see the thin line between reproduction and parody. The New York City accent, made up as it is from so many sources, often as rich and effective as it can be raucous, has had so much fun poked at it on stage, in the movies, on the radio, that it is sometimes difficult for a writer operating in that genre to keep from writing skits in stage Jewish or stage Irish. There is one comic bit in Marty that is vaudeville and no more, a conversation between two Irish women in a bar. Their dialogue is a set joke that has no relevance to the story of Marty or to the movie in general and, despite the fact that the scene has received some praise as a bit of comic reality, the ladies are extremely false and even their accent becomes stagy.

Since Chayefsky’s main concern is the emotional situation with which his play deals, he does well to avoid too much of this kind of excrescence. He says in the CBC broadcast that “people don’t care where it [the story] is set as long as they recognize it,” and if he continues to focus his attention on problems that have a universal quality his Bronx could be as valuable to him as Dublin is to O’Casey.

_____________

Since loneliness is not a state limited to Fordham Road, Marty becomes a sympathetic character as soon as Chayefsky (with Borgnine’s help) makes clear that Marty’s unhappiness is genuine, that it is not a stage convention being used to set up a phony romance. When Marty is given depth, which is achieved dramatically by showing his single state in conjunction with the ideas of his mother, his friend Angie, and the youthful lecher Ralph, his relationship with Clara becomes touching. Writing for television has taught Chayefsky, as he says in his notes, to focus attention mainly on one or two characters and to present them in a situation in which the events are ordinary and the drama, what there is of it, is internal.

In most of his scripts the plot (“the urgency,” as he calls it) is the exploration of a familiar relationship—parent to child, husband to wife—and the results of that relationship. In The Mother a daughter tries to get her active energetic mother to settle calmly into a useless old age in the hope that somehow, in the course of caring for the dependent mother, she will receive from the latter the love that she never thought she had had as a child. In The Bachelor Party a young husband and father-to-be who has begun to feel trapped finds in the course of an evening with the boys that his marriage has meaning. In Catch My Boy on Sunday a mother tries to push her child into a career as a television actor so that she can get vicariously the attention she never received from an indifferent father. Reduced to one-sentence summaries, the plots sound like standard situations straight out of the psychiatric social worker’s case book. Occasionally, they sound that way in the reading too.

Chayefsky is best when he lets his story tell itself in dramatic terms, when he avoids excess of explanation, when he focuses on his characters who are, after all, largely inarticulate. Since he cannot do so consistently, a script occasionally becomes heavy and stagy and has to be lifted by the actors. There is a preposterous schoolteacher in Catch My Boy on Sunday, for instance, who explains everything to the father in a way that no respectable teacher would; it is not the schoolteacher, but the author speaking, and he is saying to the audience precisely what he is afraid he has not successfully shown by indirection. When Marty suddenly realizes that he wants to call Clara and that the superior, disenchanted young men around the bar are wrong, he says all that needs to be said in a few sentences that do not violate his character; but the speech that Charlie makes at the end of The Bachelor Party, a long encomium on marriage, beats a dead dog, for the emptiness of the boys’ search for fun has been shown dramatically.

Occasionally, in describing what he is trying to do, Chayefsky gets fashionably pretentious. He says, “In Marty, I ventured lightly into such values as the Oedipal relationship, the reversion to adolescence by many ‘normal’ Americans, and the latent homosexuality of the middle class.” This is a tall order, even for light venturing. Still, in a sense, he is accurate. Marty’s dependence on his mother might well be Oedipal and his dependence on Angie could possibly be homosexual; in his relation to both of them and to Clara he may well be a thirty-five-year-old adolescent. Chayefsky insists that Marty is not a study in abnormality and, of course, it is not. He brings all this up to show that on television it is possible to suggest what would only be viable on the stage if it were drawn broadly and specifically. He is probably pushing the intimacy of television a little too far; it is possible to suggest the custard pie of homosexuality on stage without hitting the audience in the face with it as Tennessee Williams does in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a lamentable play that sounds like a parody of some of his earlier, better work. Since most supposedly normal people sometimes behave in a way that could be labeled neurotic or even psychotic, Chayefsky does himself a disservice by insisting on what is, after all, only part of a more complete picture.

_____________

Chayefsky also says of Marty that it is “a comment on the social values of our times,” a remark that has more immediate validity than the suggestions quoted in the paragraph above. Marty lives in a community which puts a primary value on marriage, as is clear from the opening scenes in the butcher shop, and in a relationship with his single friends which demands that they approve his choice of a bride. These two forms of social pressure, the first most strongly presented in his mother, the second in Angie, exacerbate Marty’s own sense of inadequacy. The film also examines the place in society of the widowed mother whose marrying children leave her no family to take care of. And it has something to say about the conventional mores that set up the pattern of approach in sex, love, and marriage.

Although Marty touches on such a variety of social situations, it cannot be said to have social significance in the sense that the plays of the 30’s had. Social pressures do affect the individual in the solving or the recognizing of his own problem, but only in passing does Chayefsky indicate that something might be wrong with the society that puts on the pressure. Despite his admiration for Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller, among other playwrights, Chayefsky accurately describes his attitude in the CBC interview: “I just can’t buy social resolutions any more.”

There is, however, a social, as well as a psychological, view of the world in the sadness, even the desperation, that pervades all the Chayefsky scripts, even the comedies. This atmosphere is obviously a hangover from the 30’s when the political order of the day called for a tired, lugubrious setting. Now the political significance is gone and the sadness, seen through the eyes of Freud instead of Marx, serves as a reminder that Marty Pilletti and Willy Loman have joined Phil the Fiddler as acceptable figures of popular culture.

Chayefsky’s lower-middle-class characters are not even particularly beset by economic difficulties; the only economic problem that the author returns to with any regularity (in his notes) is that of the television writer, and even that is a relative one when one considers that Chayefsky probably makes more on a single script than most college instructors do in a year’s teaching. It is true that Marty has to decide whether or not to buy the butcher shop; that Charlie in The Bachelor Party is afraid the expected child will mean he can never get the schooling that will jump him from bookkeeper to accountant; that the father in The Catered Affair is worried about how the proposed grand wedding will bite into the money he has been saving to buy his own taxi. Yet the economic problems, like the social ones, are tangential. Only in Printer’s Measure, where the old compositor’s job is threatened by the linotype, is the economic problem closely mixed with the personal one, and even here the emphasis is on the personal.

In only one sense can Chayefsky’s plays be said to make a specific social point, and that is by omission rather than by direct statement. Although he deals with a community in which a number of groups mix, there is never any indication—except for the rock through the synagogue window in Holiday Song, his first script—of friction among them. There are, in fact, many indications of amiability. Marty, in telling Clara about the death of his father, mentions that the news was brought by a friend of his father and adds, almost as an afterthought, “a Jewish fellow.” In The Mother, when the old woman reports for work to the Tiny Tots Sportswear Co., Inc., she takes part in a scene that mixes Irish, Jewish, Negro, and Puerto Rican workers in a happy union. Certainly such groups do live and work side by side at least in toleration. Still, there are flare-ups, differences which are inevitably given group definition.

Harriet Arnow, in her novel The Doll-maker, deals with a Detroit neighborhood in which families with different religious, racial, and national origins live in a kind of open neighborliness that breaks from time to time into obscene and angry bigotry. Mrs. Arnow’s picture has more basic honesty than Chayefsky’s, but then she is working as a novelist and has more freedom than Chayefsky, who must respect all kinds of television taboos. It is unlikely that the advertising agency, which has an important voice in the final form of any television script, would allow any gratuitous suggestion of bigotry unless the author and director could build a strong defense for it. It is probable that the network itself, almost as sensitive as the agencies, would prefer not to show any kind of group friction, except in a script in which that friction is underlined and damned, a position that may be morally strong, but is artistically weak. Perhaps Chayefsky considers that prejudice and group discord are irrelevant to the kind of stories he has to tell, but they are certainly no more irrelevant than the intrusive chumminess that is occasionally displayed. Whoever is responsible for the omission, the result is a Pollyanna-ish sunniness suffusing an otherwise carefully delineated milieu, a breach in the realism of which the author is so fond.

_____________

Chayefsky returns again and again to the matter of realism. For him the term implies not only that his characters should Speak in their peculiar accents and live on recognizable streets, but that they should be forced to deal only with problems they would be likely to meet. For this reason he avoids the murders, suicides, plagues, and myriad dramatic events that have always filled novels, plays, and films. The most outrageous act of violence in the Chayefsky canon is in Printer’s Measure, in which the compositor destroys the linotype with a sledge hammer. Chayefsky does not even like to do violence to logic by allowing a character to appear in a room in which he would be unlikely to have reason for entering; for that reason he believes that television, with its multiple sets, allows for a realism the stage cannot reach.

Chayefsky’s realism is part of a respectable tradition going back to the origins of modern drama in Europe and to the Group Theater in this country, but he has dispensed with the overt social message that was their concomitant. He mentions Death of a Salesman as the closest thing to reality on the stage, and yet his The Big Deal, the script that comes closest to Miller’s play, is, on his own admission, his stagiest work. He has cinematic antecedents in the documentary school, but the transference of that technique to American fiction films has focused on material that would be foreign to Chayefsky’s intention, being used, for instance, in films like Boomerang centering on violence, and often in straight crime movies.

_____________

Whatever his antecedents and allegiances in earlier dramatic and cinematic techniques, whatever his debt to urban regional writing, whatever his dependence on the television medium for the control of his realism, Chayefsky has developed a style that is personal and impressive. None of his scripts, not even Marty, is without defects; some of them, like the gimmicky Holiday Song and the derivative The Big Deal, have only incidental merit. But if his notes are at all indicative of the way he thinks, he is honestly critical of his own work. He is adept at handling language and aware of innately dramatic situations in otherwise commonplace surroundings. He has produced one good movie and some television scripts that are certainly as good as any the medium has uncovered. Still, he appears to be completely wedded to his narrow realism, a strength that may finally be his weakness.

Those who think that television drama, such as Chayefsky’s, is the American drama of the 50’s (and the feebleness of Broadway in the last few years gives them cause to think so) do not always realize that realism has gone to television by default. That medium, which wears its “spectaculars” with such gaucheness and murders fantasy with the blunt edge of literalness (for instance, the musical version of Thurber’s The Thirteen Clocks), handles the close-in quality of Chayefsky’s plays with great skill. In the movies, however, realism appears to be out of fashion. It is not simply that Hollywood has turned again to the Biblical and historical spectacle (as has England and Italy), but our serious film makers, such as William Wyler and John Huston, use their cameras to go beyond simple realism, to suggest values that are evanescent and intangible. In The Night of the Hunter, the new film which Charles Laughton directed for Paul Gregory, there is even a not-quite-successful attempt at extreme stylization. Marty has few qualities that are specifically cinematic; it is essentially a filmed television play. Part of its impact probably lies in the simple fact that it knows what it is trying to do and does it with an assurance unusual in a time when many film makers are working uncertainly toward something more.

On the stage, too, there is the same feeling that realism is not enough. The operatic direction of Elia Kazan and the athleticism of Joshua Logan; the shouting sexuality of playwrights like Williams and Inge; the development of a highly stylistic, somewhat nerve-wracking acting style by Marlon Brando out of Actors Studio; even the reversion to turn-of-the-century melodrama in overstuffed items like Anastasia, are, regardless of their merit, part of the same trend.

Chayefsky is now at work on a full-length play; it will be interesting to see if the author’s concept of realism, which has strength on television, becomes a dwarf on stage. Chayefsky’s reduction of traditional realism to the narrowest possible limits makes, at the moment, for vital television drama, and his undeniable ability in handling the form gives him stature in that medium. But with the continued insistence on “little people,” and the similarity of basic situation which is already evident in his work, there is the danger that his realism will be reduced to inconsequence.

_____________