The same Richard Fleischer who gave us the tight, expert "The Narrow Margin" offers this kaleidoscopic slice-of-life under the guise of a heist movie. It had possibilities: the lives of several inhabitants of a small city, circa mid-century, (the kind of town which today is picturesque but impoverished and forgotten) are traced as events lead up to a bank robbery to occur at noon on Saturday. Some of the threads are 99.44-hundredths pure soap opera (the crumbling marriage), some implausible (the mousey stalker), and most of another makes little sense: it's the one about Sylvia Sydney as a librarian come upon hard times (her last name is the name of the town) -- and its coherence and point seem to have fallen to the cutting room floor. But Victor Mature as the solid (what else?) police officer gets to confront a gang of nasty villains (the young Lee Marvin among them) with the help of an Amish farmer, improbably cast by Ernest Borgnine. As in "Friendly Persuasion" and "Witness," this film gingerly accepts (if marginalizes) a minority religion only to ratify it wholeheartedly when Borgnine proves his red-blooded American manhood by abandoning his pacifist creed lock, stock and double-barrel (Hollywood's broad-mindedness only extends so far). Though ultimately episodic and unsatisfying, Violent Saturday opens a window into a mid-1950s lifestyle and mindset that makes it more interesting now than it probably was upon release.
Review of Violent Saturday
