RARA-AVIS: RARA-AVIS Re: Violent Saturday (film version)

From: Chris Schneider ( chrisaschneider@earthlink.net)
Date: 22 May 2003


> on 5/22/03 12:25 PM, jumblejim at jumblejim@prodigy.net wrote:

> [...] I'm really rather inordinately fond of the movie--can't quite
> say why, but I like it a lot. It's why I read the book (not the other way
> around).
>
> Jim Beaver
>

   Well, there's always the fact that it was directed by Richard Fleischer, the man behind "Narrow Margin" (the *good* version, with Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor) and "The Boston Strangler" and "10 Rillington Place" (Richard Attenborough as post-war British killer Christie) and "Compulsion" (Bradford Dillman and Dean Stockwell as Leopold and Loeb) and "The Vikings" and
"Mandingo." A director, all in all, who was at his best when his characters' instincts were at their worst.
   Here are two snippets from Chris Peachment's mini-review of "Violent Saturday" in Time Out:

    "Any movie which features [Victor] Mature, [Ernest] Borgnine and [Lee} Marvin has to be some kind of primer in slobdom."
    "Growling that women and children 'make me nervous,' [Marvin] can make his continual inhalation of benzedrine look like deep degeneracy. When a boy knocks the nasal spray out of his hand, he treads all over the kid's fingers."

   Marie Windsor, playing the dame in "Narrow Margin," has a memorable moment when she sneers "Relax, Percy! Your shield's untarnished!" Something tells me that Fleischer's own "shield" was tarnished rather early in the game ...

Chris

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