Tonight's Movie: Violent Saturday (1955) at the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival

One of my favorite new-to-me films seen at this year's Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival was VIOLENT SATURDAY (1955), starring longtime favorite Victor Mature.

Mature's daughter Victoria was in the audience to watch the film with us, and Mark Fleischer, son of director Richard Fleischer (THE NARROW MARGIN) was interviewed after the screening by festival host Alan K. Rode (photo below).

There was wonderful old-fashioned showmanship at the Camelot Theatre, which closed the movie screen curtains before the film started. As the 20th Century-Fox fanfare began, followed by the CinemaScope extension theme, the curtains parted to reveal the dazzling wide picture on the Camelot's huge screen. A goosebumps moment!

Mature plays Shelley Martin, who lives in the desert town of Bradenville and works in management at a local copper mine. He's happily married to Helen (Dorothy Patrick), with two boys (Billy Chapin and Donald Gamble) and a baby girl.

Mine manager Boyd Fairchild (Richard Egan) loves his wife (Margaret Hayes), but they're having a rough time of it, and he's attracted to nurse Linda Sherman (Virginia Leith, A KISS BEFORE DYING), though they don't act on it.

Into Bradenville come three men who are up to no good: Harper (Stephen McNally), posing as a traveling salesman, and his associates Dill (Lee Marvin) and Chapman (J. Carrol Naish). Their goal: Robbing the Bradenville bank.

The planning of the heist is juxtaposed against the goings-on among the lives of several townspeople. Many of them will be impacted in one way or another by the robbery, along with Stadt (Ernest Borgnine), an Amish farmer who lives outside of town with his wife (Ann Morrison) and three children (Donna, Noreen, and Kevin Corcoran).

The movie was described by Rode as along the lines of PEYTON PLACE meets crime film, which seemed an apt description. It's an absorbing film which covers a lot of territory in just 90 minutes. Sydney Boehm's script was based on a novel by William L. Heath.

Mature, Egan, and Borgnine are always worth watching, and although I prefer McNally as a hero, he's always good as a villain (i.e., WINCHESTER '73). Dorothy Patrick (seen here with Mature) is a longtime favorite I was glad to see in this, even in a relatively small role. Leith also has a good turn as the sympathetic nurse.

There are a couple discordant notes; Sylvia Sidney as a librarian driven to stealing by financial desperation is a small and fairly pointless role, other than to perhaps show that even "good" people do bad things.

Tommy Noonan is plain icky as the bank manager, who's a peeping Tom stalking Linda in his off hours. His character is just kind of gross, with no consequences other than a slap on the hand. Indeed, Linda is very casual about the whole thing when she learns what he's been doing.

The movie was evocatively filmed by Charles G. Clarke in Bisbee, Arizona, a fascinating setting with the town built on multiple levels, nestled against foothills. I visited Google, as I wanted to know more about the town's unusual layout, and learned that in recent years Bisbee has hosted a 4.5-mile run over nine staircases which dot the town.

VIOLENT SATURDAY was released on DVD and Blu-ray by Twilight Time.