Part of Nashville: A City On Film and Belcourt 100 Seminars
General Admission: $16 | Belcourt Members: $13
*Ticket includes the seminar and a screening of MARTY immediately following at 12:00pm.
Our next Belcourt 100 seminar focuses on the period between 1927 and 1958, when the Belcourt Theatre shifted from silent movie house to playhouse stage to remain a vital force in Nashville’s cultural life. Beyond the Footlights explores this pivotal era when the Belcourt became home to the city’s first professional community theatre organizations, including the Nashville Children’s Theatre and more. During these transformative decades, the theatre evolved into a dynamic creative hub — shaping performance practices, refining production standards, and professionalizing the art of local storytelling.
This seminar traces how these theatrical companies cultivated a devoted patron base, legitimized community-based performing arts, and launched the careers of actors, directors and producers who would go on to shape American film, television and stagecraft. Their influence extended far beyond Nashville, helping shape a century of moving image history.
More than a footnote, this period was foundational. It solidified the Belcourt as Nashville’s premier venue for live, theatre-style performance — the roots of cinema. Drawing on archival research and cultural history, the seminar reveals how a single stage nurtured generations of artists and embedded theatrical creativity into the DNA of Nashville, poising the Belcourt to become one of America’s most enduring cinematic institutions and the city’s oldest neighborhood theatre.
Presented by T. Minton, Belcourt’s public historian and archivist
MARTY | Watch the Trailer
Dir. Delbert Mann | USA | 1955 | 90 min. | NR | DCP
Ernest Borgnine delivers a deeply human, Academy Award winning performance as Marty Piletti, a kindhearted, unmarried Bronx butcher nearing middle age who has resigned himself to a quiet life of routine. Pressured by his family to find a wife yet consistently overlooked, he unexpectedly meets shy schoolteacher Clara at a local dance. What unfolds is a quiet, deeply affecting romance that must survive not grand obstacles, but the small, biting discouragements of those closest to them.
Adapted from a teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Nashville native Delbert Mann in his feature debut, MARTY was groundbreaking in its focus on the real emotional stakes of everyday people — far from the gloss of typical Hollywood romance. The film’s success at both the Cannes Film Festival (Palme d’Or) and the Academy Awards — it won in four major categories — solidified its place in Hollywood history as a triumph of understated, character-driven storytelling.
Mann and supporting actor Frank Sutton both trace their acting and production roots back to the Belcourt Theatre, tying this film’s legacy to the city’s rich theatrical past and the Belcourt’s foundational stage — a place that cultivated important national talent during the mid-20th century.
“There is not one word, one scene in the whole thing that doesn't ring the bell of truth, and anyone seeing it should emerge from the theatre with a sense of satisfaction rare in the movie-going experience. To put it simply, Marty is great.” —Baltimore Sun (Jun 18, 1955) “Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote the script, has captured the human element deftly. Here are human beings as they really are, refreshingly life-like, piteously real, and often hilariously funny.” —Marjory Adams, Chicago Tribune (May 16, 1955) “MARTY is one of those films that appear every few years or so — a picture so sensitively acted, so tenderly written, so human in its appeal, that it has the utmost distinction, no matter what kind of audience is in the theatre.” —James Berardinelli, Boston Globe (Aug 4, 1955)
