"Marty" provided one of the classics of both television and the American film because it captures vividly and touchingly a number of aspects of the American experience. While being about people who are far from glamorous, its mundane characters have a beauty and a dignity that were felt by viewers far from the Bronx. (p. 46)

What is most extraordinary about "Marty" is the amount of material Chayefsky can include in less than an hour. We have not only Marty's bourgeoning relationship with Clara but also those with his family and with his friends. We see Marty in all his roles: first, as butcher; second, as an aging adolescent with his aimless friends; third, as a son and a brother; and, fourth, as man in love. The last view gives a meaning to his life that allows him to see the other roles in their proper perspective: he must be the man of his own house, and he cannot live meaningfully by wandering around with Angelo every night. (p. 47)

[One] of Chayefsky's gifts is the ability to make his audience suspend judgment about his characters. He wants our sympathy and understanding. Perhaps, this relationship between audience and material makes Chayefsky so successful a television writer: he brings other homes into those of his viewers. The relationship between viewer and play becomes as intimate as the domestic setting in which the play is viewed.

"Marty"'s success is also attributable to Chayefsky's fortunate reluctance to resolve all the conflicts he has developed at the end of the play. Marty may have decided to call Clara despite his friends' and his mother's opinion of her, but that only means that he will confront the inevitable conflicts rather than avoid them by remaining a thirty-six-year-old adolescent. The end of the play is really, therefore, only the beginning of more but different conflicts for Marty. (p. 48)

Marty, in its film realization, took on a new and powerful direction because the setting is presented as an important force in the lives of the characters…. Throughout the film, the sense of verisimilitude that is reinforced by the location shots becomes a powerful counterpart to Chayefsky's brilliant Realistic dialogue and to his realization of character. Indeed, this sense of place transforms Marty from a good television script to a brilliant film.

The other additions and changes to the original script also enhance the atmosphere of the piece. The story has been enlarged by filling in details of character and action. (pp. 93-4)

Certainly the most important aspect of the screen adaptation is the fuller picture of the central character. From a quiet, lonely man we see Marty blossom into a joyous, garrulous soul…. (p. 95)

Marty was not the first picture to treat urban life in a vivid, realistic fashion. We only have to think of Kazan's brilliant film On the Waterfront which was released two years before Marty and which was a triumphant piece of cinematic Naturalism; but Marty, unlike its unrelievedly grim predecessor, managed to celebrate the possibility of beauty in even the homeliest circumstances. The Bronx shown in Marty is a neighborhood of lonely, unhappy people; but the love we see develop during the weekend that the film shows us negates any sense of inevitable entrapment…. The unique formula that made Marty such an important cinematic event was an effective blend of a romance with a happy ending that was presented within the framework of naturalistically conceived setting and characters. (pp. 95-6)

..…

[The Hospital is] the finest statement of the ideas that have so far pervaded all of [Chayefsky's] work. A daring film in its mixture of varied tales and tones, The Hospital is a vision of the nightmare that modern man has created for himself. (p. 115)

Living in the chaos that Chayefsky sees as our world cannot help but be hellish for a sensitive person. The central character of The Hospital [Dr. Herbert Bock] is the most effective realization of Chayefsky's typical hero—the man who is struggling to regain the sense of meaning without which "the only admissible matter left is death."… (p. 117)

The Hospital is, above all, an audacious work. Where Chayefsky failed in his play The Passion of Josef D. to combine a personal history with the larger social forces surrounding it, he has, in The Hospital, been able to combine a number of stories successfully. Moreover, the nightmare vision of society is presented in comic terms. The world we see is absurd, but the point of view is not the despair of the Absurdists. If Bock's story shows anything, it is the fruitlessness of despair. If any work of Chayefsky's has demonstrated his interest in "characters caught in the decline of their society," this one does. The world seems to have reached a state of incurable madness, and the options for man seem to have dwindled to two: either he departs, or he remains to fight a futile battle. (p. 118)

In The Hospital, Chayefsky combines a clear-headed vision of contemporary chaos with a plea for retaining some of the old middle-class verities that have been vilified by late twentieth-century Americans. He rejects radicalism and hedonism as self-serving, and he celebrates discipline and responsibility as being at least constructive. The radicals threaten and scream, but the middle-aged men of the Establishment run the hospital as best they can. With this support of the virtues of the middle class, Chayefsky evinces intolerance for its less praiseworthy propensity for greed and ruthlessness. (p. 119)

Above all, though, The Hospital exposes one of our society's favorite myths: the belief that bureaucracies are efficient. The hospital is the perfect example of the inhumanity that results when people within an institution are regarded merely as cogs in a big machine. In this film, as in The Latent Heterosexual, Chayefsky voices his fear of the predatory nature of bureaucracies—their ability to rob a man of his humanity….

As usual, the mood and tone of the film are sustained by the brilliance of Chayefsky's language. The jargon of the hospital reminds us of that of the accountants and lawyers in The Latent Heterosexual. The rhythmic syllables of digitalis and pulmonary edema seem to have mystic powers of their own, and to be the modern counterpart of the Indian's thunder dance in old Drummond's room. The Latinate diseases and cures seem for most of the characters to replace real human communication. Chayefsky uses such jargon to emphasize his sense that people's loss of individualized language reflects their loss of individuality…. (p. 120)

The Hospital is a marvelous film because it displays a brilliance of wit and a soundness of judgment unusual in American screenplays. And the mastery with which Chayefsky juggles the many different stories of the characters makes the film a tour de force. (p. 121)

..…

"I write out of social necessity" is a rather daring statement for a playwright to make, but Paddy Chayefsky is still convinced of the importance of the artist to society. While his medium and his message have changed during the years, and while he was never so doctrinaire as Clifford Odets or Arthur Miller, Chayefsky has, in his work, manifested not only his love for the individual but also his anxiety about the society that engulfs the individual. His primary theme is the de-personalization of modern American society, and his works present something of a social history of urban America. (p. 127)

From "Fifth from Garibaldi" to The Hospital, Chayefsky presents us with a three-generation picture of urban America—from idealistic immigrants to their ambitious children to their disillusioned grandchildren. From belief in the saving value of love, the author moves to an admiration for those who, like Dr. Bock, fight the battle to maintain at least the illusion of order….

We can see this progression toward disillusionment and social concern by looking closely at Chayefsky's heroes. Chayefsky's first heroes are the little men—nice, easygoing, working-class people who want some brightness in what seems to be a very grey life. Chayefsky does not paint them as victims of the corrupt socioeconomic system as does Odets, nor does he create them as the tragic victims of the illusory American dream as does Miller in Death of a Salesman. Chayefsky is not interested in why Marty Pilletti or Charlie (The Bachelor Party) are where they are; he is only interested in that which can offer them some joy. Marty and Charlie suffer from the American sickness, prolonged adolescence; but they both finally realize that there is no such thing as the freedom that married men feel they have lost. Aimless wandering is no replacement for the love of a woman.

Critics have attacked Chayefsky for ignoring the non-psychological aspects of these men's lives—can his Charlie ever be happy trapped in the same dreary niche all his life?—but the author was in his early years enough of a believer in the individual spirit to feel that a man transcended his environment; a man didn't change it or succumb to it. In this sense, despite all the emphasis on Realistic depiction of environment, Chayefsky is not a Naturalist. There is always a happy ending, and that happy ending is a discovery of the transforming value of love…. By the time Chayefsky created Arthur Landau, the focal figure of The Tenth Man, that happy ending seemed to lack some conviction. Landau's sudden ability to love seems to be the author's depiction of his need rather than a possible conversion. His rebirth seems less credible than Ellen's dybbuk.

Arthur is an early version of The Hospital's Herbert Bock, the intelligent, successful man who has failed with everything that is emotional; and we see in The Hospital that mankind has no time for lasting emotions in the midst of chaos…. The heroes of The Tenth Man and The Hospital, like the focal characters of The Passion of Josef D. and The Latent Heterosexual, are no longer the simple, nonintellectual little men. Chayefsky is no longer interested in the redemption of a mundane world through love; he needs leading men who can analyze a less curable despair.

The progression from Marty Pilletti to Herbert Bock is also part of the stylistic change from "slice-of-life" Realism to the more eclectic mixture of dramatic techniques that characterizes Chayefsky's later work. Marty was a character to be watched and sympathized with; Herbert Bock must also be understood; for he … is the author's spokesman. Chayefsky moves, during his career, from the well-wrought Realistic vignette through the quasi-Shavian dramatic argument to a more abstract black comedy. At the same time, his focus broadens from the individual to society itself—a change that requires a less focused, more complex form of presentation. (pp. 129-31)

With Herbert Bock, Chayefsky has managed an effective synthesis of his … approaches to character. Bock … emerges as a real person who is beset by all the anxieties and failures that seem to be attendant upon sensitive men. His marriage is a failure, his children disgust him, his job no longer offers him any sense of worth, and his money does him no good at all. Bock is articulate almost to a fault, but he seems to strike successfully the uneasy balance between the typical and the familiar. He is as real as Chayefsky's early characters, yet he operates within the framework of a highly contrived near-farce, and he functions as Chayefsky's own spokesman.

As a matter of fact, The Hospital succeeds as a fascinating synthesis of all that has gone before. Like The Latent Heterosexual, it presents a comic picture of de-personalization in a bureaucratic society. Through Bock's dialogues, it presents Chayefsky's favorite topic of man's sense of meaninglessness in a senseless world. Like The Tenth Man, it offers a romance between two people who have been injured by contemporary life, but their romance has no happy ending. The film meshes reality with fantasy, but so successful is Chayefsky at depicting his vision of a mad world that both the reality and the fantasy seem credible. We also see in The Hospital the other crucial progression in Chayefsky's work—that from sentimental drama spiced with humor to very unsentimental comedy. (pp. 131-32)

After The Tenth Man, Chayefsky's style began an interesting series of transformations that resulted in a style far better suited to the richness of his later plays, if one less vivid at delineating social types. In Gideon, Chayefsky tried a highly stylized quasipoetic language for his Old Testament characters. The vocabulary is rich, often ornate (a characteristic of all of Chayefsky's work in the 1960's); and the language rolls along rhythmically, though without very much imagery. It does not have the overly mannered quality of MacLeish's J.B., but neither does it have the beautiful imagery that redeems the latter play.

From the poetry of Gideon, Chayefsky moved to the crackling dialogue that makes The Americanization of Emily such a vibrant script. The contrast between the brash Madison and the cautious Emily makes their scenes fascinating, comic confrontations; and the subtle parody of military clichés is successfully presented. As a matter of fact, the basis of much of Chayefsky's dialogue in his three recent comedies is parody of the jargon of American institutions: the military expressions of bravery and honor; the legal-financial jargon of The Latent Heterosexual; and the medical mumbo-jumbo of The Hospital. The minor characters in each work become one with their jargon. Clichés seem to come to life and to threaten those who would oppose them.

Chayefsky's style has remained fairly constant since The Americanization of Emily in which the vocabulary is extremely rich and constantly indicates a fascination for words…. The result of this fascination with the sound and variety of words is a rich, highly literate language. If we combine this language with a fine, acerbic wit and spice it with a mastery of the well-timed colloquialism, we have the dialogue that characterizes and illumines Chayefsky's work. (pp. 132-33)

[Chayefsky] has moved from the area of sentimental, Realistic comedy to satire; and he has, in the process, become one of the few … dramatists with the combination of perception and wit that is needed if the playwright is to follow in the path of the great writers of comedies of manners. His theme is the chaos that man has made of his world through his lack of perception or through his failure to accept any social responsibility. His targets are those bastions of American faith: the military, the corporation, and the hospital—and the crime that they all perpetrate is the robbery of individualism. Where Chayefsky began his career by glorifying the good heart of the "little man," he now attacks the institutions that have robbed people of their identity and their dignity. He is not interested in what he calls the "vogueish youthful philosophy" of violence but in the assertion of individual responsibility. In the face of a "collapsing society," he has moved from objective Realism to a far more personal style—to one that reflects his feeling that "Writing has become more and more interior with me now."

Chayefsky now calls himself "a playwright who has no theater," for he has forsaken the legitimate stage for the greater freedom and wider audience offered by the film. The results so far have been fascinating, but the film medium seems alien to such verbal eloquence. (pp. 134-35)

Clearly, whatever medium Chayefsky chooses to work in, he is still one of our finest talents. (p. 135)

John M. Clum, in his Paddy Chayefsky (copyright © 1976 by Twayne Publishers, Inc.; reprinted with the permission of Twayne Publishers, a Division of G. K. Hall & Co., Boston), Twayne, 1976, 149 p.