This is a great movie!


It is shown on tv once in a while and is worth watching. The cast is top notch. You will enjoy it.

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Dull, dull, predictable melodrama. Douglas Sirk without Sirk's style. All superficialities with no substance. Borgnine wasted in a bit part as an Amish farmer with a decidedly city accent. 5/10.

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Douglas Sirk didn't make films like this, and if anyone's style was superfiicial it was Sirk's -- all gloss with no substance, the reason his "style" is celebrated in some quarters today. VIOLENT SATURDAY isn't a perfect film but to compare it to the work of the man who directed MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, THE TARNISHED ANGELS and empty nonsense of that ilk is ridiculous. Sirk may have been capable of better things but there is nothing in VS that is remotely Sirk-like. Flesicher did a far better job with this kind of film, a genre he excelled in.

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I don't care what anyone says I love this film if not for the quirky team of Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin and that pitchfork in the back scene.

This film will unfortunately never see the dvd light of day. Its hard to believe that dvd is already 15 years old!!

Why is this film so bad? In the heels of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea; Richard Fleisher switches genres in one of his earliest projects.

The scene where the bank manager confesses to be a peeping tom is classic and in those days women think it is a complement, where today it is demented or perverted, but then again why would a woman take off her clothes in front of an open window anyway?

I think this film stands as a great addition to Lee Marvin's other 6 films of 1955

catch it if you can!!

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I agree with you about the film, but I think it will come onto DVD one day. (But it has never been on home video in any format yet.) I also love the pitchfork scene, but the one that's really startling is the shotgun blast that takes out J. Carroll Naish. When I saw this in the theater a few months ago the audience gasped at that one!

I did think Tommy Noonan as the peeping Tom should have been killed. He had it coming.

But this wasn't a switch of genres for Richard Fleischer. Actually, it was a return to the sort of B crime films he had made at RKO -- for instance, ARMORED CAR ROBBERY, and above all THE NARROW MARGIN. It was this last film whose huge success paved the way for Fleischer to move into big-bugdget A pictures. But 20,000 LEAGUES was the unusual picture for Fleischer then, not VIOLENT SATURDAY. Later he made lots of big-budget, big screen action pictures as well as many other crime films.

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This is being rebroadcast on July 26th on Fox Movie Channel if anyone is interested

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Showing again on Fox Movie Channel on Sept 28th, and Oct 18th, both days at 10AM EST. Can't wait, I've been looking for this film for ages.

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Lee Marvin was at the top of his game - in the bank robbery scene, doesn't he say, "Shut up lady - I'll kill you quick!"

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This flick is one of the really good Fox flix of the fifties! Interesting story line, well acted by the cast members. Dull? Hardly! And as to Borgnine's portrayal of the peace-loving Amish farmer, a very good job indeed!Too bad that today's movie makers don't check it out to see what good movie-making is all about. It may not have been a "classic," but "Violent Saturday" had all the elements that would satisfy customers coming into the theatre for all good afternoon's entertainment.

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The last couple of scenes looked a little like the director went on sick leave and let someone else do them. It would have been nice to flesh out the hospital room scene a lot more. I'd like to know what became of Elsie.

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Same here regarding Elsie. At the end of the film, the only 'personal' story that didn't have a satisfying denouement was hers.

A great film, though, and it was fun to see Borgnine as an Amish farmer.

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"Elsie" used her money to invest in a radio station in Cincinnati... WKRP!

Sylvia Sydney played a wonderfully sadistic "Mother Carlson" to Gordon Jump's jumpy manager-son.

Check out an episode!

PS Sydney was quite a hottie back in her day. Look at some of her older pix. In fact, she still had her figure when she made this movie!

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Only the last 20 minutes were worth watching. All the melodramatic subplots brought down the movie big time. I found them so bizarre... with the kid not appreciating his dad for not being some John Wayne-type of war hero, and the guy stalking the woman... where was the grit and tension I heard about? Lee Marvin's always interesting, but this film doesn't get high marks from me. It felt more like Peyton Place than anything else.

"Now what kind of man are YOU dude?"

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To be honest I wasn't expecting this. I thought it would be a hardboiled crime picture, but instead it is a crossing between crime and melodrama. This I found to be refreshing and interesting. You realy care for some characters and you dislike others. In the robbery scene these characters get there "comeuppance": Elsie loosing the money she had stolen, the wife of Egan gets shot (which is all the more painful since she seemed to have made up with her husband) and Noonan gets wounded (afterall, he only just was a peeping tom). I like this sort of moralism blending in with the action.

I thought the side stories were pretty good, although the Mature character ending up being a hero was a bit corny. Still, kids, at least young boys, are like that: they think it is important that they're father is a hero or someone big. I appreciate these subplots while it gives us info and an emotional background to the characters. Above all, I like we get to know the bad guys. Marvin seems to be the meanest guy, but we learn that he is indeed insecure and in need of someone who will listen to him. The bad guys are made human. All in all I like this movie alot.

Someone made the comparison between VS and the work of Sirk. Another commentator found Sirk superfluous and overrated. To each his own I guess, but I absolutely love the work of Sirk. I don't think you have to look for hidden psychological meanings in his work, because it is all spelled out. The use of symbolism and the use of colour by Sirk is breathtaking. Above all, Sirk deals with honest human emotions in a cinematical way. Sometimes performances are over the top (like Stack in Written On The Wind), but overall they are solid in my opinion. I can see some commonalities between VS and Sirk: the colour photography and indeed some subplots. Still I find this a very different movie and to me it doesn't fit the Sirk canon.

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It probably could have switched to the action mode some 5-10 minutes earlier, but since the so-called "melodrama", which is to say, getting to know the townsfolk as well as the robbers, was compelling enough, there's no point to complain. And while Mature turning out to be the day-saving hero was indeed predictable and kinda corny I guess (especially the final scene with all the kids congregating in his hospital room), it's ultimately a small matter. A very solid film in all.



"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan

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I found it pretty good

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I've been chasing this movie for years. It was on TV a lot when I was young, but I only caught bits and piecea of it -- which made things very weird: what's the connection between an Arizona mining site in the middle of the desert and an Amish family with a nice house and some harvest nearby? Aren't they supposed to be in Pennsylvania?

It more recent years, I would see it listed in the "TV Guide Grid" but on Fox Movies. And I didn't GET Fox Movies. So I'd have to just wonder about it.

Finally watched it on Hulu this week (December 2021.) Its just as wild a hybrid as I thought it was way back when -- that mining site(with explosives going off) and those Amish STILL don't mix.

Its main value to me is how it LOOKS. It reminds us that a movie is not JUST the story. Its the world created by the filmmakers, and in this case, the gorgeous colors that widescreen Techniclor can give you. Thus we have wide-screen vistas of the Arizona desert and mining Goliath; and the bustling and detailed "small town city" that is called Bradenville in the movie but was really Bisbee, Arizona(where Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger return in LA Confidential.) Add in the "piece of time"(James Stewart's phrase) of seeing Bisbee in 1955 -- the people, the cars(especially VIc Mature's bight blue number), the hairstyles, the clothes -- its a movie experience ASIDE from the plot.

The plot -- famously, I guess -- mixes small town Peyton Place melodrama with a bank robbery scheme; we get a nice "Hotel" style buildup of all the personal stories and then watch the bank robbery blow all of the stories apart in a life or death manner.

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Bad Day at Black Rock came out the same year, had two of the same actors (major ones aborning: Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine) and wide open spaces in Technicolor and Cinemascope. Black Rock has better writing , but both movies show the punch -- and the limits -- of violence in 1955 action noirs. As it turns out, in Violent Saturday, the good guys get to KILL all the bad guys -- quite violently but with no blood( two get shotgunned and fly through the air to instant death; one gets a pitchfork in the back.) Ol' Spencer Tracy in Black Rock only got to get the bad guys arrested(thought the most sadistic of them got burned up a little bit, yay.)

You might say that Bad Day at Black Rock and Violent Saturday are the Charles Bronson/Clint Eastwood movies of the 70's 20 years too soon for REAL violent payback, but I felt that Violent Saturday was "more like it." We shoulda had a remake in 1975..now its too late.

The domestic dramatic scenes are badly written and stiffly acted in that 1955 way (whether husband-wife, or father little boy son -- corny) , but the crime side of the story works quite well, as does the weird imposition of the anti-violence Amish(led by Ernest Borgnine!).

1955: What a year for Ernest Borgnine. Supporting parts in Black Rock(bad guy) , Violent Saturday(good guy) and then the Best Actor Oscar for Marty! Anybody else go from bit player to leading man in the same year? (Tracy was nominated for Black Rock and jokingly told his co-star Borgnine "so how come you beat ME?"

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Which reminds me: what a cast Violent Saturday had. A couple of near miss leading men, stardom wise(Victor Mature for action, Richard Egan for domestic melodrama); a near-miss bad guy over the title with them(Stephen McNally), "Marvin and Borgnine" lurking under the titles and stealing the movie. Tommy Noonan as a cutesie pie Peeping Tom. And two women with that weird, hard and polished 50's woman look...but one of them pulls off sexy quite well(even as it the OTHER actress who is playing the trampy wife of alcoholic Egan.)

And that blonde who played Mature's wife was better looking than any of them. Makes sense. He IS the hero of the movie.

Great to look at, filled with nostalgia, a photo finish between noir and Peyton Place...Violent Saturday is well worth a watch.

And check out the late night scene with the bank robbers in their pajamas!

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