Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

Violent Saturday Blu-ray Movie Review

Maybe that's why Sunday is a day of rest.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 31, 2014

There are a lot of things that go against the grain in Violent Saturday, an almost criminally underrated thriller of sorts from 1955, but one of the oddest is that Violent Saturday is a heist film that really isn’t all that concerned with the actual heist. Oh, sure, there’s a meticulous plan set up to rob the local bank by a bevy of bad guys, and there’s an isolated little town in the American southwest going about its business (both good and bad) without an inkling of what’s about to hit it. But Violent Saturday is almost obsessively focused on the various damaged characters who wander in, out and through an “old west” town that creeps up an Arizona mountainside and which seems to be a relic of a bygone age. That little town is Bradenville, the kind of “village” where everyone knows everybody else, and yet no one seems particularly aware that virtually every inhabitant is hiding a secret or carrying around some personal baggage. Town librarian (and obvious descendant of the town’s founders) Elsie Braden (Sylvia Sidney) is about to be evicted and isn’t above purloining a forgotten purse at her place of work in order to forage cash to make ends meet. Shelley Martin (Victor Mature), partner in a huge copper mining concern whose operations ring Bradenville in mounds of slag, is stung when his little boy informs him the other little boys think he’s a coward because he didn’t serve in World War II. Shelley’s partner, Boyd Fairchild (Richard Egan), drinks too much and wonders if he’s being cuckolded by his bored wife Emily (Margaret Hayes). But while Boyd may indeed be obsessed with the mote that’s in Emily’s eye, he seems completely unaware of the beam in his own, courtesy of his infatuation with local nurse Linda Sherman (Virginia Leith). Local bank manager Harry Reeves (Tommy Noonan) also has an eye for the ladies, Linda in particular, an eye that takes him out wandering to cast furtive glances through windows. Now mind you, these are the supposed good folks in Violent Saturday, the imminent victims of a bank robbery being planned by three interlopers. Screenwriter Sydney Boehm (The Big Heat), adapting a novel by William L. Heath, is obviously not interested in standard genre conventions, at least if they get in the way of detailing the roiling personal lives of a cast of characters who seem to have been ported over from a daytime soap opera.

The actual bad guys are introduced interstitially in this opening gambit of townsfolk dysfunction. Harper (Stephen McNally) checks into the Bradenville hotel on the pretense of being a traveling salesman. His acolytes Dill (Lee Marvin), a Benzedrine snorting madman, and Chapman (J. Carroll Naish), a fastidious little man who could pass for an uptight accountant, are coming in by train. In what initially appears as just a decidedly odd detour, Chapman briefly interacts with some Amish folk on the train. That was no mere screenwriting stumble, as soon becomes clear.

It’s instructive to note how director Richard Fleischer (The Narrow Margin) introduces most of the characters in the film’s opening act. Just as in any good small town, people are always watching other people. Fleischer has a natural entré into the material because the three villains are staking out the town, trying to finagle as much observational information as they can. Repeatedly in the opening sequences, a character will glance here or there—perhaps only perusing things in general—and then the camera will reveal the next character, who’s standing nearby. It’s no mere coincidence that Harper actually spies Elsie making off with the purse in the library—he may not be noticed (especially by Elsie), but he’s not particularly subtle in his spying activities. While at least one character—the Peeping Tom bank manager— takes this idea to extremes, it’s rather remarkably present in several of the townsfolk as well as the would be thieves.

There’s been quite a bit of debate about how to categorize Violent Saturday, with some insisting it’s a neglected noir and others just as adamant that the film hardly qualifies in that genre, and is more of a traditional melodrama. Commentators Nick Redman and Julie Kirgo opt for a “noir-melodrama hybrid” label, and that probably suffices as well as anything, but really there’s so much going on beneath the surface here (is that copper mining excavation a Grand Metaphor?) that Violent Saturday actually kind of willfully defies pigeonholing. The film can almost be seen as a sibling to home invasion films, with the entire town of Bradenville being home in general in this case, and a certain Amish farmer’s ranch being a specific case.

Ah, yes, the Amish. Here yet again Violent Saturday seems to flaunt its individuality in the face of the audience. Years before the film version of Friendly Persuasion made religious non-violence the focus of a major film (albeit in that instance, Quakers), the very same idea is explored here, courtesy of a violence eschewing Amish man named Stadt (Ernest Borgnine—yes, that Ernest Borgnine). Once the heist does take place (almost as an afterthought), the bad guys, who have already killed one supporting character, take another character hostage and hightail it to Stadt’s place. That sets the film up on a kind of precarious third act change up, where the film’s rather graphic violence is suddenly thrust into a philosophical light.

Finally, there's the completely odd but somehow prescient melding of a mid-century American confidence starting to get buffeted just slightly by the winds of change, winds that seem to be rather polluted in and around Bradenville. This is a film that is almost molded into the countryside (as exemplified by Bradenville itself), and yet which repeatedly scars the vast expanses with scenes of ecological devastation. When "a room with the view" carries the twin subtexts of looking out on slag heaps and spying on your neighbor, everything about this supposedly bucolic little burg seems destined for disaster. Ultimately, to no one's surprise, non-violence only goes so far in isolated southwestern towns, and even supposed happy endings have a rather bittersweet quality in this often amazing film.

Violent Saturday Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Violent Saturday is presented on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.55:1. The commentary on this Blu-ray mentions this being a new HD transfer Fox did after Twilight Time released their DVD version of the film in 2011. My assumption is this was probably the same master used for the British Blu-ray which was released a few months ago, at least when judging by a cursory comparison of the screenshots between the two reviews (I've tried to get close to at least a few of the shots from Svet's review so that an easier comparison is possible). One way or the other, this is by and large a fantastic looking transfer, one that reproduces Charles G. Clarke's sometimes shimmering, sometimes gritty CinemaScope lensing with precision. I'm not a huge fan of Deluxe Color, and this does look just slightly brown to me at times, but that's also the palette being exploited a lot of the time, so it's a niggling concern, at best. Contrast and color space are consistent, and there are no signs of digital manipulation of the image. Many outdoor scenes offer stupendous depth of field.

Violent Saturday Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Violent Saturday's original four track stereo soundtrack gets a 5.1 repurposing courtesy of a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix. As befits the film's era, some of the foley effects aren't especially convincing (gunshots, while propulsive, have a bit too much ambient reverb on them, at least to my ears). But there's actually good separation here, helping to establish the sometimes busy environment of downtown Bradenville. Dialogue is very cleanly presented, as is Hugo Friedhofer's enjoyable score.

Violent Saturday Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary features Twilight Time's resident duo of Nick Redman and Julie Kirgo. While entirely conversational, this is another great commentary that gets into a number of interesting elements. Kirgo points out some of the reasons she feels there's an environmental subtext to the film.


• Isolated Score Track is presented in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0.

Violent Saturday Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Call it a noir, call it a melodrama, call it a thriller, call it a hybrid, just call it "must see cinema". This is one of the most distinctive films that foists a bunch of violent criminals off on unsuspecting middle Americans, and its rather trenchant examination of a crumbling American Dream is really fascinating. While supplements here are a bit slim, technical merits are first rate and Violent Saturday comes Highly recommended.