selling out...or speaking to the audience?

maybe i'm just now obsessed with relating everything back to a gray flannel suit, but once again i felt as if, here was another fairly original, creative text which was reshaped into the same dominant middle-class narrative about trying to move up in the world, that we saw in give us this day. marty not only wants to move into an apartment, but now he wants to buy up the butcher shop, goes on a long soliloquy about how he always wanted to go to college and never got to, and finally brings in some mediocre psychology by commenting on his and clara's fear of "being on their own" and learning to move out from under the yoke of their parents.

now, i'm not necessarily judging the movie as bad (but am i right in thinking "gene kelly was married to her?") but maybe this is just part of what drew commented on earlier as the necessary adherence to the demands of the audience. and i suppose there's no saying that paddy chayefsky wasn't thrilled to be able to develop marty into a longer storyline–perhaps feeling that he could explore even more than just "latent homosexuality."

finally, i allow this: that the story is sweet. and that counts for something. i don't just mean "i liked it" because obviously that would not be a profound thing to say for a graduate student. i mean that chayefsky maintained a certain sincere warmth in marty's character and in his 'sticking to his guns,' as it were, to ask out clara again despite his friends' disapproval. his simple language, and his homeliness, and his mass on sundays with mother may be cheesy, but they're also endearing and something many audiences–both of the fifties and today–can identify with.

so i guess i'm saying i shouldn't fall into the snob category of chiding chayefsky for creating a film that is so much of the genre of fifties's middle class culture. after all, i've watched and loved virtually the same movie in about sixty different forms: twenty-seven dresses, bride wars, made of honor, the wedding date, princess diaries, etc.–and what will my kids say to me about that? exactly.