“Marty” would prove to be a career-defining role for a then-fledgling character actor named Ernest Borgnine, who even in flattering press was described as “a big ugly, hulking guy” far from the screen idols of the time like Cary Grant or Rock Hudson. Produced on a relatively paltry budget — even for the time — of $273,000, with only $5000 going to Borgnine, the film was based on a 1953 NBC TV play written by Paddy Chayefsky (“Network”) and directed by Delbert Mann (“Desire Under the Elms”), who would both return for the big screen take. Originally starring Rod Steiger as the homely Bronx butcher who longs for love, the film version swapped in Borgnine after the more intense Steiger refused the draconian contract terms of production company Hecht-Lancaster. 

Made up of literary agent/House Committee on Un-American Activities informer Harold Hecht (nicknamed “the Mole”) and intimidating movie star/former circus acrobat Burt Lancaster (who worked with Borgnine in the previous year’s best picture winner “From Here to Eternity”), Hecht-Lancaster had designs to make a European-style realist movie in Hollywood by shooting all the exteriors on actual New York City locations. However, as Borgnine describes in his autobiography “Ernie,” when the company returned to LA they found that things weren’t strictly on the up-and-up:

“We came back to Hollywood to finish shooting the film, but there was a problem. No Sets. Everybody was stunned, especially Delbert, who had been told that they were being built. Turns out there were some financial shenanigans attached to the picture. The plan, I later learned, was to shoot half the movie, then put it on the shelf and write it off. That was, the producers could pay themselves a salary, yet not have to show a corporate profit. But the tax man said no. In order to do that, they had to finish the picture, show it once, and then take a loss. I’m not sure that was good news, but it was better news. We’d get to finish the film.”