This week has been Spring Break for my school, Palm Beach Atlantic University, and it gave me time to finally see two films I’d heard a lot about. One of the them, Marty, is over 50 years old and I caught it on a cable movie channel, and I finally caught up with Juno, about the 16-year old pregnant teen. Both films were independent productions of their eras and both convey their respectively unique lyricism of ordinary lives confronting crises.

Marty (1955) began as an early television play in 1954, during what has been called the “Golden Age of Television,” when most programming was live (before videotape) and talented writers delivered a new drama on weekly anthology shows. This was the era when teleplays were good enough to be adapted into theatrical films (others included Rod Serling’s Requium for a Heavyweight, and Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men.

Marty is a beefy 34-year old single male, a butcher whose siblings are all married and whose mother and the neighbors in general are constantly asking when Marty will settle down and get married. Marty would love to, but his attempts at finding a prospective spouse meet with one rejection after another. Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky’s dialogue is both realistic and poetic as he used repitition to capture the rhythm of Marty’s frustrated search for a mate:

I wasn’t totally excited about seeing the latest adventures of Rowan Atkinson’s nearly silent comedian–I liked his television episodes (available from Netflix and other sources) and the Bean feature film was good fun but nothing I couldn’t wait to catch on video. But as my son’s school starts this week, I think he wanted both Mom and Dad to see it as the Summer’s Last Film event. So we went Sunday–and I’m glad I saw it in a theater. It was better than expected.

Reviewers had been mixed on the movie (as they usually are on most films) but either you like Mr. Bean’s form of retro-slapstick and sight gags or you don’t. Atkinson, who’s funny when speaking as well (see his hilarious Bond spoof, Johnny English) has the rare gift of the great silent comedians like Chaplin to use his body and facial expressions to compensate for the lack of dialogue. Bean speaks only in a low mutter and other

Mr Bean's Holiday Trailer