[By] contrast with the vapidity of routine cinematic fare, Marty appears—at least at a casual glance—as a refreshingly unusual film….

Marty has all the qualities of an unpretentiously filmed fait divers, an anecdote involving ordinary people and presented with an effort to achieve veracity in characters, backgrounds and moods. And it could be accepted as such and dismissed with a conventional review were it not for the fact that it obviously attempts to be something of far greater depth and that both critics and public seem to have looked at it through a magnifying glass which lent it dimensions it does not even approximate….

At the root of the misunderstanding is the claim that Marty is a realistic film. Seen in proper perspective, it is at best a "slice of life", a fairly adequate exercise in imitating the premises and practices of those among the Italian "neo-realists" whose art has been steadily on the decline towards naturalism. Inspired by the oversimplified tenets of this school, the author and director of Marty have inevitably lapsed into the errors inherent in its approach. If we now examine Marty more closely, we shall see that it betrays reality rather than reveals it. There are three basic abberations—symptomatic of the naturalistic outlook—in the authors' vision of man and society:

—Instead of interpreting objects, people and situations so as to bring out their essence, the film merely reflects their superficial aspects.

—It seeks to represent the individual and society statically, "as they are", instead of capturing them in transition, in the process of becoming.

—It selects particular, idiosyncratic rather than typical characters and events, sacrificing realism to "story interest".

                                                         (p. 7)

[On] the plane of characterization the consistent under-interpreting leads to a diminution of clarity. Out of deference to the premise that mere showing is sufficient to unveil, Chayevsky and [director Delbert Mann] have refrained from any implicit comment. Only the more advanced, more conscious members of the audience will perceive the anomaly in the fact that the schoolteacher's habitual Saturday-night occupation is watching Jackie Gleason on television; only they will realize that in the afternoon bull-session among Marty's pals, not merely their ennui but the work of Mickey Spillane is being stigmatized and ridiculed. But the Angies of America will at best have a laugh and may wonder which book of Spillane's was quoted in the film. The much-praised ballroom scene contains some apt reportorial touches. But it appears pale when seen through the lucid compactness of analogous scenes in Studs Lonigan. It is undeniable that Chayevsky and Mann often show a remarkable capacity for noticing detail, as in the gum-chewing, the bovine faces, the antiphonal "I dunno". But a sense of observation can no more be equated with the power to reveal than an impression can be with a judgment.

In the static treatment of character is manifest the naturalistic film-makers' refusal to take a moral stand…. Clara thinks that Aunt Caterina's desolateness is in the course of things human, and she suggests solving the problem by the adoption of a "hobby". Her platitudes, which Chayevsky advances in earnest, reveal him a dilettante in sociological issues. Nothing in his interpretation indicates any awareness that the practice of separating generations within a family is not necessarily a sempiternal one…. Even the hero, Marty, discovers no new values and remains essentially an apology for the status quo. His falling in love cannot be considered a dramatic change—it brings him no fresh insights, he is merely carried away passively from his bachelor loneliness to the marital felicity he has always sought. There is no sign that he has found a way to combat the essential desolation of his life. His love is at best an irrelevant fugue, an application of the sententious formula: les amoureux sont contre tout le monde. His pals remain submerged in their morass, he himself reverts without so much as a moment's reflection to the same hebetating values in which the vacuity of his existence originates. Where, then, are those profound social implications alluded to by the critics? Just as Executive Suite was a resounding paean for the "altruistic executive", so Marty is a quiet dithyramb for the little businessman.

In the opinion of some critics, Marty's adventure suggests a simple answer to the lovelorn in our country…. Love is a problem—and not only for the Martys and the Claras. Yet there is a curious general tendency to dissociate affective problems from the underlying structure of the society and the basic tenets on which it is founded. Instead, emotional aberrations and insufficiency are reduced to exclusively "individual" dilemmas and hopefully consigned to psychoanalysts and Riesmanian sociologists. The social origin and moral implications of affective indigency are thus allowed to remain in the obscurity of ignorance and myth. Nor does Marty rectify this myopic approach to love. The protagonist is a particular case, he has his own individual problem, he is unprepossessing and shy.

He finds the solution—or rather the solution is visited upon him from without—in a stroke of pure chance. Yet through fallacious identification the audience will be inclined to see Marty's case as having a more general significance and to assume that the film has dealt discerningly with a "social problem". By an unobtrusive trick of moral sleight-of-hand an extra-ordinary occurrence has been substituted for the typical, for a dramatically necessary dénouement.

Ultimately, the naturalistic propensity for reduction to the particular engenders a curious paradox: events, characters, even bits of dialogue become dissociated from the context, verisimilitude disappears along with truth, and we are left with the suspicion that these fragments are being exploited for the sole purpose of creating diverting effects. Gags like "plenty of tomatoes" are only the most obvious examples of this disintegration. The scene in which the nostalgic sisters hover in macabre reminiscence over the old country where their contemporaries are dying out could have had the function of imparting relief and poignancy to the underlying theme of solitude. Instead, not only do the women often come perilously close [to hackneyed immigrant types] …, but so many of their lines are obviously geared to provoke explosions of guffaws that the impact of the more serious side of the dialogue—and with it the whole purpose of Chayevsky's excursion into gerontology—is literally laughed away. At moments the humor is so strained that it becomes utterly unbelievable. (p. 8)

But one of the most flagrant implausibilities is the existence of the Marty-Clara couple itself, as presented in the film. One need not be a snob in order to expect the burgeoning love between schoolteacher and butcher to be attended by certain vicissitudes, certain unevennesses following inescapably from the discrepancy in milieu. Instead, without a struggle, without even resorting to the subterfuge of bad faith, Clara assimilates her New York University education into the mentality of the prospective shop-owner, entering into raptly empathic contemplation of his projects and his scruples regarding the 35-40% mark-up.

Ironically enough, this film, whose intention is clearly to provide insights into a social milieu and its problems, actually encourages an unquestioning conformity in the public through the innocuousness of its presentation. Ostensibly attacking the question of solitude, Marty leaves unscathed precisely those corrosive values which are at its origin. The spectators will sigh and comment that "that's the way things are in this life". What have they gained? A few chuckles at human foibles, perhaps a few quasi-lessons (such as that beauty is only skin deep)—but Marty certainly has not contributed towards bringing to the surface of consciousness their secret doubts. That they were lonely they knew before—why they are lonely they still do not know.

To an audience confined within the cardboard world of "mass-entertainment", a few glimpses of everyday life may convey an illusion of truth. Only in this way can we account for the wide acclaim with which Marty has been received. (p. 9)