As Adam Batty notes in his essay on Violent Saturday (found in the Blu-ray’s accompanying booklet), Richard Fleischer presents something of a puzzle for those with an auteurist agenda and/or wishing to study the director’s work as a complete artistic statement. How can one be a ‘Master of Cinema’ and yet lack an easily identifiable mark? Fleischer’s oeuvre took in everything from noir tales, Viking sagas, sci-fi, serial killer dramas (The Boston Strangler, 10 Rillington Place) to Amityville 3D and Conan the Destroyer? It’s a head-scratcher, for sure. Let’s settle on the opinion then, for now, that he made some fine motion pictures and is an underappreciated talent.
Violent Saturday is something of a forgotten picture in Fleischer’s career yet it’s a remarkably taut and gripping mixture of pulp fiction and melodrama. Imagine Jim Thompson by way of Douglas Sirk. The film is a heist drama that instead of focusing ‘on the job’ weaves together various characters, vignettes and plot strands (all within 90 minutes!) that come together in a brutal third act.
Shot in CinemaScope, another riveting flourish is how claustrophobic the film feels at times and how compositions and framing play a vital symbolic function in the achievement of such an effect. The setting is a small town in the desert, where everybody knows everybody else’s business. Yet nobody spots a trio of crooks casing a vulnerable bank. The unfolding plot and the visuals are locked in a dance of … death? An essential existential noir-fatalism, too, is astir via a line uttered towards the end, in which a widower ponders the tragic reality that you can wake up in the morning with the whole day before you and be stone cold dead in the afternoon. We think rarely of how often our fates are in other people’s hands.
Extras
As well as an illustrated booklet, featuring an essay on Violent Saturday within the context of Fleischer’s career and press cuttings, there’s a documentary featurette with William Friedkin (who is a huge fan of the director and this particular film) and an analytic featurette, in French with English subs. The Blu-ray transfer is a swell-looking thing, especially in the night scenes, where no detail is lost.
Martyn has awarded Violent Saturday four Torches of Truth
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