Page "Marty" Paragraph 21
from
Wikipedia
: It's the stark, simple portrait of a gentle, lonely man, played by Rod Steiger, who lives with his mother, works as a butcher and longs for a loving relationship as he heads toward middle age.
" I'm 36 years old and I've been lookin ' for a girl every Saturday night of my life ," he tells his best friend.
After despairing about how to spend it, and then suffering another humiliating rejection when he calls a girl to ask her out, Marty finally decides to attend a lonelyhearts social at the Waverly Ballroom.
There he meets a girl ( Nancy Marchand ) who has just been ditched by her blind date — a slick fellow who offers Marty " five bucks if you take this dog home for me.
Even in the afterglow of a wonderful evening, Marty is subjected the next day to ridicule from his friends, who insist that the girl is a homely loser not worth pursuing.
The drama is most convincing when it sticks with Marty — and much less so when it drifts off into a stilted subplot about his mother's attempts to convince a sister to move into their household.
Because the whole play is less than an hour long ( a subsequent film version of the play ran 90 minutes ), the second story simply gets in the way.
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