VIOLENT SATURDAY (1955)

Always at his best in modest genre & pulp projects, director Richard Fleischer had just raised his profile with Disney’s first bigtime live-actioner 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (fun, if lightly padded to RoadShow length), when 20th/Fox grabbed him for this exemplary bank robbery B+ suspense programmer.  A paradigm of early CinemaScope framing and a showcase for grain-free DeLuxe Color saturation, Fleischer has the cast, the script & the locations to lift a basic caper-gone-wrong pic into near classic status.  Stephen McNally, Lee Marvin & J. Carrol Naish are strangers-come-to-town, casing the local bank and finding a perfect post-theft hideout at Ernest Borgnine’s quiet Amish farm.  Of course, nothing goes quite as planned thanks to a host of small town events & bad timing, personal issues cleverly sketched and smoothly integrated by Fleischer from Sydney Boehm’s crafty script.  There’s bank manager Tommy Noonan, fixated to distraction by slinky Virginia Leith, a gal aware of her allure, currently interested in Richard Egan, unhappily married dipsomaniac, due to inherit the town’s ore mine.  And what of Sylvia Sidney’s sticky-fingered librarian, desperate to pay off overdue bills.  Most of all, Victor Mature, manager of Egan’s mining properties and the owner of a car sharp enough to catch the attention of the robbers.  Just the thing to get them anonymously over to that Amish farm post-stick-up.  Then a quick switch to a farm truck before they skedaddle off with the loot.  Engineered and constructed to hide the seams, everyone’s gathered at the bank at just the wrong time before Mature is pushed to play barnyard hero at the farm.  Sharp, deadly and showing pinpoint accuracy in every composition (multiple planes of action/multiple framing devices inside the WideScreen frame), this one offers prime pickin’s on every level.

DOUBLE-BILL: Earlier this year, Borgnine played baddie for John Sturges in the similarly intended BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK/’55.  With A-lister Spencer Tracy as star, and a social issue backing the storyline, it got a lot more attention than a Victor Mature starrer, but this holds its own next to it.