1955: Marty

Screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky
Adapted from the teleplay Marty by Paddy Chayefsky

Marty is a bachelor in his mid-30s. All his siblings are married, and people, especially his mother, are constantly pestering him to follow suit. To get them off his back, he grudgingly goes to a dance hall one night, where he meets a young woman named Clara who has just been horribly rejected by a blind date. Marty and Clara hit it off, but as soon as his friends and family find out, they realize that they actually want Marty to stay single.

This is an unusual adapted screenplay winner, since rather than being adapted from something in print form, this movie was based on something else that was filmed. The original was a 51-minute teleplay that was broadcast live on "The Philco Television Playhouse" on May 24, 1953; the adaptation came out two years later and was about 40 minutes longer. Since they were written by the same person, it should come as no surprise that the two versions are very similar. Most of the scenes in the original were adapted word-for-word into the movie. Even the cast is similar: Marty's mother, Aunt Catherine, and best friend Angie are played by the same three actors in both versions.

The changes that were made pretty much all improved the story. The TV version goes straight from Marty and Clara meeting at the dance hall to them at Marty's house, which is kind of abrupt. The audience hardly gets to see them interact at all, and finds out very little about Clara, before he tries to kiss her. In the movie, they go for a walk and to a restaurant together, and we see them get to know each other first. This makes the audience believe in their relationship more, which makes for a much more intriguing story. The remake also has time to further develop some of the secondary characters, particularly Marty's cousin and his wife, who are only in one scene of the original but come back multiple times in the adaptation. These and other additions significantly improve the pacing. The feature film may be almost twice as long as the teleplay, but it certainly doesn't feel like it. It's a fairly simple story, so it didn't need to be too long, but it definitely benefited from that extra 40 minutes that changing the format allowed.

I don't mean to imply that the original version is bad; it's still a sweet, well-told story. But the movie is definitely better. Rather than an original versus a remake, this felt more like comparing an earlier draft with the final draft of the same script. One would hope and expect that a draft written two years later by the same person would be an improvement on the original, and in this case, one would not be disappointed.

Coming up next: yet another Best Picture winner, Around the World in 80 Days, based on the novel by Jules Verne