Violent Saturday

Richard Fleischer’s Violent Saturday is a tour-de-force of brutality, both physical and emotional, that borrows heavily from the Western genre. Ostensibly a story of a small town bank robbery, Fleischer’s direction and Sydney Boehm’s script masterfully emphasize character development throughout the first half as three bank robbers (Stephen McNally, Lee Marvin, J. Carrol Naish) arrive to scope out the town; the revelation of broken souls beneath the surface is perfectly symbolized by the copper mining equipment devouring the earth and creates a brilliant slow burn. Sexually obsessive bank manager Harry Reeves (Tommy Noonan) stalks local nurse Linda Sherman (Virginia Leith) at night, while mine owner Boyd Fairchild (Richard Egan) drinks away the pain of his wife’s (Margaret Hayes) affairs, her golf swing a symbol of her own sexual frustration. Then, in the second half, the robbery introduces a sort of protracted hell in which the violence is up close and intimate, each act its own explosion of horror. Victor Mature plays Shelley Martin, a mining executive and family man who’s forced to drive the getaway car that transports the robbers and their loot to a hideout on a nearby Amish farm owned by Stadt (Ernest Borgnine) where bodies fall one by one in the light of the southwestern sun.