Paddy Chayefsky won a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Marty (’55), but it wasn’t adapted from a book or a play or any non-cinematic source. The Delbert Mann-directed Marty was, line for line, Chayefsky’s own live-TV play — same dialogue, barely “adapted”. It was simply filmed on celluloid and slightly “opened up” with two or three exteriors rather than captured on live TV.
Initially posted on 6.2.14: “There’s one thing wrong with Delbert Mann and Paddy Chayefsky‘s Marty, which won 1955’s Best Picture Oscar and launched the career of Ernest Borgnine after he took the Oscar for Best Actor. (Mann also won for Best Director; ditto Chayefsky for Best Adapted Screenplay.)
“The problem is that jaunty Marty theme song, which apparently wasn’t written by score composer Roy Webb but songwriter Harry Warren and arranger George Bassman. The brassy and fanfare-ish waltz is entirely out of synch with the simple, somewhat sad story of a lonely Bronx butcher and his loser friends and a girl he falls in love with.
“The purpose of the song was purely about marketing — the idea was to persuade audiences that Marty wouldn’t be too much of a downer. It succeeded in that goal but the music sure feels like a downer now.”
