Violent Saturday by W. L. Heath

1955 Hardcover First Edition

- Spoiler Alerts!

Although the 1955 film starring Victor Mature is better known, W. L. Heath’s novel is a hard-boiled, neglected masterpiece. The advance word on this novel was strong and caught Hollywood’s attention from the start. Darryl Zanuck purchased the film rights before the book was published. There are notable differences between the film and the book. The novel is tighter, blunt and unrelenting. Set in the Alabama town of Morgan, a little place seething with atavistic racism, lust and greed. The book is a series of character studies, broken into sub-chapters as the story develops. It is a slice of reality, and the dialogue includes frank discussions on alcoholism and sex. None of the characters are particularly appealing, but they are all linked to the bank robbery that occurs after three men arrive in town on Friday. Of these, Shelley Martin is the nicest, although his views on Asians and Negroes are not unusual for the period and location. His goal for that weekend is harmless (he wants to go fishing) whereas everyone else in town has an ulterior motive. These are people who are controlled by their selfish interests in sex and money. Heath outlines each character’s weakness in detail. Emily and Boyd Fairbanks are alcoholics and Emily is consistently unfaithful to Boyd. And Boyd is a drunken wimp. He loves his wife and tolerates her infidelity because he doesn’t know what to do about it. The banker, Harry Reeves, is a voyeur. He gets worked up when he sees the new nurse in town, Miss Benson. He begins the habit of stalking her, and he lurks in the alley at night so that he can watch her undress through a window. Sexual desire is a reoccurring motif in the book, and it affects all of the charters both directly and indirectly. In the novel, Reeves is unredeemable. When he spies Miss Benson coming out of a five-and-dime “He fed his eyes on the motion of her hips straining the white poplin skirt as she walked, and the deft switching back and forth of the hem of her skirt above the seams of her stockings. It filled him with desire, and he had to look away from time to time, drawing deep breaths of the hot summer air.” (p. 98) By the conclusion, after being shot up in the bank, his fate is to lay in the hospital bed as Miss Benson administers his care, and the sound of the “efficient swishing of her uniform” is maddening. His fate is to suffer an existential hell of unrequited desire. Other characters include Sugarfoot, the bellhop in the Commerce Hotel where the robbers are staying. Sugarfoot is a stereotype. He drinks too much, is nosy, and discovers the men have a shotgun with them which makes him suspicious. His failure to act, and to only drink and snoop about, turns his character into something of a Greek Chorus character. He exists to explain what he sees, but he has no outward redeeming qualities himself. Shelley Martin is drawn into the plot when the robbers hijack him for his car. They leave him tied up in a barn, but he manages to get free. Martin is forced to kill, and the violence of that Saturday is quick and unblemished. The Robbers also kill in the bank. I found the conclusion touching, made up almost entirely by dialogue between Martin and his wife. They had both survived something terrible, and Martin is grateful for his wife and children. W. L. Heath was a journalist for many years, and his prose follows the same clipped, journalistic approach that Hemingway used and made popular. There are no poetic embellishments. 

The film takes a different approach. Violent Saturdayis often described as film noir but that statement is incorrect. The film is a Cinemascope DeLuxe color movie made in Bisbee, Arizona. It might best be described as a crime drama, but because of the location and certain plot elements introduced by screenwriter Sydney Boehm, Violent Saturday plays like a modern Western. Where the book’s robbery takes place on a rainy day, the film is bright and sunny and filled with breathtaking scenery. This is a study in contrasts; both the film and the novel effectively use identical material but turn it into something fresh and exciting. Victor Mature plays Martin, and his character is a veteran of WWII, but his son is upset that his father never won any medals for heroism like the fathers of other kids. This embellishment saddles Mature with the notion of proving himself, which he obviously does. The three robbers are played with appropriate menace by Stephen McNally, Lee Marvin and J. Carrol Naish. Miss Benson is played with compact sexiness by Virginia Leath, and Reeves is played superbly by Tommy Noonan. Richard Egan and Margaret Hayes are excellent as the tortured Fairbanks.’ Hayes has one of the film’s best bits of dialogue: “You’re an alcoholic and I’m a tramp” which does not appear in the novel. The script introduces Ernest Borgnine as an Amish farmer. Borgnine and his family are held captive in the barn with Mature/Martin. This adds a quality to the film not found in the novel. Martin and the Amish farmer are the two unblemished, honest characters in the film. By comparison, all of the other characters are tainted in some way; they are fractured, greedy and sexually immoral at all levels. Martin and the Amish farmer get their hands dirty by killing, but their motivation stems from survival rather than greed. Too much is made of the fact that Victor Mature never gave himself much credit for his acting ability, yet, in truth, he was always quite good; sincere and capable. He reminds me here of a beefier version of Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo in First Blood. Mature is good, but his role is secondary. He provides the necessary violent conclusion that everyone is waiting for. None of the acting is overstated. In fact, Richard Egan avoids slapstick in those scenes where his character is intoxicated. He plays it straight and the film is made better by the even keel maintained by the excellent cast. The location is changed from Morgan, Alabama to Bradenville, a fictional copper mining town, and while the location is never mentioned, the location scenes make it clear this is the southwest. Directed by Richard Fleischer, son of Max Fleischer of the famed Superman animation films, he is also known for directing the flashy 20,000 Leagues Under the Seafor Disney.

I recommend both the book and film for those of you that haven’t encountered this story. Violent Saturday is quintessentially American; at once ugly and disturbing, but occasionally infused with a higher sense of purpose, like an intoxicating perfume.