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Then all at once something very peculiar happens. A guy comes up to him and wants to know would he like to make five bucks. For what, Marty asks. The guy says, for taking a "dog" home: "I got stuck on a blind date." Marty is horrified. "You just can't walk off on a girl like that!" he gasps. The guy shrugs and pedals off and somebody else gets the fin, but the girl (Betsy Blair) won't have any part of this deal. She goes out on the fire escape and cries. Marty goes out after her and, knowing exactly how she must feel, tries nobly to take the curse off what has happened.
He asks her to dance. "You're not such a dog as you think you are!" he says, trying to sound enthusiastic. They get talking and then they go for a walk. All at once they're both feeling all full of beautiful colors and Marty starts telling her things he never told anybody before —hardly even himself—about the war and the awful time after he came home. He can't stop talking and people are looking at them but neither of them notices until all at once in the craziest place right beside a big empty brick wall with his heart shining out of his face and his eyes filling up he hears himself saying in a shaky voice, "Yuh got a real nice face! Really a nice face!"
Hardly a moment on the screen since Chaplin made the last scene in City
Lights does more deep and tender credit to the human race than this one. Like a penny in the gutter, a heart catches the light. It isn't much, and there are millions like it, but it's coin of the realm, and only a proud child, no matter what his age, will pass it by.
Playwright Paddy Chayefsky scatters such sidewalk epiphanies with a liberal hand through this almost too clever script, which he adapted from his own television play. Many of his coins go down the drain and others are too bright and shiny for belief; but at his best this writer, who was born and raised in a Jewish-Italian part of The Bronx, can find the vernacular truth and beauty in ordinary lives and feelings. And he can say things about his people that he could never get away with if he were not a member of the family.
Wonderful, too, is Chayefsky's sense of the pathos of place—drab little row-frame houses, fluorescent luncheonettes, maverick taxis under the El pillars in the night city. And along with the places, Chayefsky and Director Delbert Mann reproduce precisely the life that goes on in them. The whole truth and nothing but the truth about the unattached male is told in one hurtingly funny shot of the stag line at a public dance hall. And the scenes of porch life and corner lounging ("So whatta we gonna do, huh?") are little epigrams of futility.
The actors, under shrewd direction, prove almost everywhere as good as their material. Joe Mantell is the living image of a lamppost primitive. Betsy Blair is fully convincing as the sort of plain Jane whose homeliness is only skin-deep. Ernest Borgnine as Marty lives up to all the promise he showed as the sadist in From Here to Eternity, and at the same time brilliantly shatters the type-cast he molded for himself in that picture. His Marty is fully what the author intended him to be—a Hamlet of butchers.