Film Forum

U.S., 1955
Directed by Richard Fleischer
Starring Victor Mature, Lee Marvin, Richard Egan, Stephen McNally
Approx. 90 min.

“VIOLENT SATURDAY takes place over some 36 hours in the Arizona town of Bradenville, a community dominated commercially and physically by the copper mine, and its first hour is spent establishing its troubled key inhabitants, from the local mine owner (Richard Egan) to the Peeping Tom bank manager (Tom Noonan), and the three suave, hardened criminals who arrive to rob the bank (Stephen McNally, Lee Marvin, J Carrol Naish). There’s little morally to choose between the citizens and the crooks, though a peaceful Amish farming family (paterfamilias Ernest Borgnine) living outside town are, on the face of it, the only truly innocent people around. Then the well-planned heist gets under way at 12:55pm Saturday, the two sides come into conflict as all hell breaks loose and everyone reveals their true colours. The movie is a little masterpiece that reflects the tensions beneath the conformity of the Eisenhower years, and it’s accompanied by a shrewd pictorial essay by the French critic and film-maker Nicolas Saada.” – Phillip French, The Guardian

Presented with support from The Robert Jolin Osborne Endowed Fund for American Classic Cinema of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s and The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film

Reviews

“Director Richard Fleischer, an ace with the long frame, composes scrolling studies in horizontality, grabbing one of the most ravishing train shots in cinema. Everything keeps swirling inexorably toward the zero-hour heist, thanks to scriptwriter Sydney Boehm, who gets in some of his gristliest lines.”
– Village Voice