Violent Saturday is available on Blu-Ray in a Limited Edition of 3000 from Twilight Time.
With a title like Violent Saturday, the audience certainly has at least some idea of what to expect, yet it dodged my expectations in some ways. Having heard the film described as a noir, I was somewhat shocked by its visual style: boisterously colorful and shot in ultra-wide Cinemascope. It’s certainly not your typical noir film.
The story follows the lives of several different people who inhabit a small town, as well as three crooks from out of town who plan to rob its bank (Lee Marvin, Stephen McNally, and J. Carrol Naish). As is the case in small town life, the inhabitants’ lives are often interconnected, sometimes in unexpected, confrontational, or subtle ways.
At the center of our story is Shelley Martin (Victor Mature), a family man who works as a manager at the local copper mine. He wishes he could be a bigger hero to his son Billy, who is embarrassed that his friends’ dads are war heroes while his own father didn’t fight (when World War II rolled around, the government told Shelley to stay put and keep cranking out copper for the war effort).
Martin’s boss and friend, Boyd Fairchild (the terrific and underappreciated Richard Egan), is the wealthy owner of the mine. He considers an affair with pretty young nurse Linda Sherman (Virginia Leith), knowing that his own wife is unfaithful to him. Leith’s exuberantly tough, proto-feminist working woman is a solid foil to Boyd’s rich, bored wife, and their eventual confrontation is one of the film’s best moments.
Another subplot involves the bank’s dopey manager Harry Reeves (Tommy Noonan) and a hard-luck librarian (Sylvia Sidney) who is getting past-due notices from the bank, signed by Reeves. A chance encounter in an alley leads these two characters to both discover a shameful secret about the other which they would rather keep quiet.
The robbers identify a peaceful Amish farmer (Ernest Borgnine, what a cast!) whose remote farmhouse, pacifist nature, and lack of a telephone will serve their purposes for a safehouse retreat after the heist. Martin enters the picture when the crooks steal his car for the job, holding him hostage along with the farmer and his family. All of the film’s various threads will converge when they hold up the Bradenville Bank on one violent Saturday.
Lately I’ve been irritated by the lazy and unrealistic “it’s all connected” trope that plagues hacky modern writing (The Amazing Spider-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ’14) which is used to manufacture plots and relationships rather than actually develop them. But in Violent Saturday’s small mining community of Bradenville, this kind of interconnectedness feels much less forced and is indeed perfectly reasonable. It’s certainly more believable of a place for this kind of storytelling than, say, the sprawling metropolis of New York City, home to 8.4 million people.
Violent Saturday is a smart and engaging film which consistently intrigues and ends with some surprising conclusions, and features an agreeable cast of renowned character actors. Despite its colorful appearance, deep shadows and rich lighting still provide a noirish experience. Easily recommended.
THE PACKAGE
Violent Saturday comes to Blu-Ray from boutique distributor Twilight Time in their usual limited edition of 3000 units. The package includes a typically meaty 8-page booklet with an expert essay on the film written by film historian Julie Kirgo.
The movie does not include subtitles, which is a disappointment in this day and age.
The film is not rated but is equivalent to at least a “PG” for some mature themes (drunkenness, a peeping tom, and marital infidelity), and some violence.
Special Features
The features are very light on this release, limited to two extra audio tracks.
Isolated Score Track
This is a Twilight Time staple, but sometimes I wonder why they bothered. Violent Saturday’s subdued score by Hugo Friedhofer doesn’t seem that remarkable to me. It’s not especially bombastic or memorable, nor is it wall-to-wall sound. The music is used mainly for accentuation, meaning this track has lots of long silences. For enthusiasts only, if even that.
Audio Commentary with Film Historians Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman
Twilight Time’s resident historians offer up another conversational track which covers plenty of details about the film. Like most Twilight Time commentaries, it’s less of a behind-the-scenes and more a running commentary about the film’s cast and crew, framed in the context of history.
A/V Out.
Get the Blu-Ray exclusively at Screen Archives Entertainment:
Violent Saturday — [Blu-Ray]