kingrat wrote:THE ARRANGEMENT (1969, dir. Elia Kazan) was chosen by Illeana Douglas for her Second Looks series on TCM. She admitted that some of the directing gimmicks look very dated, such as the use of the zoom lens, the split screen, and even Batman-style graphics, but she praised the performances of Kirk Douglas, Faye Dunaway, and Deborah Kerr, and thought they merited giving the film a second look. In general, I agree with her assessment.
Man, kingrat, you cut this movie a lot more slack than I did. Maybe it was just me, but all I kept thinking while seeing it for a second time was oh, the reputations that hurtled to earth on this one! Even though I was a little kid at the time when this movie came out, the raciness of the movie (the lurid publicity promising us to "See! Kirk & Faye gambol in the sand!" stuff), and the financial and the prestige fallout that accompanied the highly publicized unleasing of
The Arrangement on an unsuspecting world was something that even I heard about at the time. Kazan's career was never the same after this debacle, though the director went on to make small scale films, teach, and write after this misstep.
I thought it was kismet that
The Arrangement (1969), one of those films that might or might not be a truly
BAD movie, was trotted out for a run around the track on TCM last weekend just as
Kirk Douglas' son Michael garnered a Best Actor award at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival and had a ratings winner for his role as Liberace in the highly stylized biopic
Behind the Candelabra on HBO. Each decade has its own interpretation of camp, I guess. And The Arrangement wasn't even trying to be camp...just terribly hip...and chockful of anti-establishment attitudes and poses.
I have mixed feelings about
The Arrangement, though one of the things I actually admire about the film--aside from the burnished glow of the cinematography by
Robert Surtees--is the take-no-prisoners approach that Kirk takes to his
(surprise!) intense character. It was the height of the corrosive Vietnam War, the beginning of the sexual revolution, raised consciousness, and the apex of a period of self-indulgent navel gazing that the world may never see again (I hope). Author and Filmmaker
Elia Kazan may have thought he was simply going through a period of honesty and self-assessment appropriate to a man in middle life. However, Kazan was never immune from courting public taste--and indeed, he had led it at times, notably during his years of work with the innovative The Group Theater, the introduction of great modern playwrights to the public (Miller, Odets, Williams, etc.) and realistic actors such as Brando. After seeing his films and reading his autobiography and the Richard Schickel bio on Kazan, I do think he was subject to following trends as well as creating them. As with many artistic people, eventually an individual finds himself trying to make himself over one more time, and there is only a finite amount of artistic capital inside--especially as one ages and tries to keep up with others as well as top yourself.
I suspect that like many people in show business at the time, a desire to stay relevant and marketable to the youth market also led him to craft this pulpy story about Ad Man Eddie Anderson, a big-time American success story who sensed something hollow in it all (gosh,
that's a new theme to explore that's never been done before or since!). In his autobiography Kazan admitted that his then wife,
Barbara Loden, bitterly resented the casting of
Faye Dunaway in the leading role, ("'She's just a lousy imitation of me,' Kazan quotes her as saying). More to the point, when she had read his original manuscript for
The Arrangement,
Loden had resented the depiction of her own private behavior in the pages of the book, so perhaps it was just as well she avoided the experience of re-living personal intimacies while filming the movie. The actors
sure earned their money in this film.
I can't fault the courage (or do I mean chutzpah?) of actor
Kirk Douglas and
Faye Dunaway. Kirk had already been a star for twenty years and he had the awards, the larger-than-life quality and intelligence to see that wasn't always a boon to his real talent. I admire
Douglas for the chances he took with this part when he chose to dive in head first and work with one of the brightest directors of his generation---too bad that this autobiographical movie was the last time that
Elia Kazan would "be given the keys to the car" by any studio. And too bad that Kazan asked Kirk to wrestle with the angst of having a lovely wife (Deborah Kerr, whose thankless role consists of her being rejected by her hubby and mollified by an oily analyst, played nimbly by Harold Gould, as Kingrat points out above), a lousy relationship with his Greek immigrant mother, though he is simpatico with his dreadful, demented Dad, played by
Richard Boone, during that good actor's long tumble down into hamminess rounds out most of the unfortunate goings-on, but there are compensations in a few scenes and a couple of others with dramatic potential that might have worked on the page and the stage, but not necessarily on screen this time.
The opening scene of the film is a corker, tapping into the dark urges and fears we've all experienced one time or another while tooling down a highway. A mustachioed, middle-aged man in a sleekly tailored suit and equally streamlined sports car is driving between two massive trucks. Out of a self-destructive sense of mischief, desire for oblivion, or simply boyish curiosity about physics, he gradually removes his hands from the wheel of the high-powered machine he controls. The action in the film spins on from that scene. Too bad nothing quite matches this early epiphany visually or emotionally.
Faye Dunaway was at the pinnacle of her stardom after
Bonnie and Clyde when she played the loving, intelligent and fantasy-fulfilling mistress of
Douglas. The beautiful, theater-trained
Dunaway was very much the "It" girl of the moment just then, it would probably have been a surprise to some back then that she would struggle to fulfill her gifts, only to scale the heights of a kind of weird immortality as entertainment industry Valkyries in both
Network and
Mommy Dearest. Her striving character, so independent and self-possessed she even leaves her married lover puzzled may choose motherhood and an open relationship with another, more malleable man over Kirk, but I kept wondering..."what will this child be like when he grows up?"
The two leads commit themselves valiantly to their roles: The pair of them gamely doff their clothes, roll about on the beach, fight, snuggle, separate and work desperately to breath life into this story of too much success. All these actors allowed themselves to be
manipulated guided into portraying characters who discover the hollowness of their ultra-hip and successful lives (they are in the "soulless advertising game," a notion that had been more incisively examined in several films back in the '30s, most of which seemed to star Lee Tracy or Warren William). It is not their fault that the characters are difficult to feel empathy for--but it is almost impossible to feel much for
Richard Boone either, who plays
Douglas' elderly, old world father, now sliding into dementia, exhibiting cruelty and castigating his poor, browbeaten wife. This leads to sequences in which Kirk relives scenes and fights within his family, chiding his mother and feeling sorry for her, but ultimately trying to gain his father's respect. While these went on, these might have been more effective in a stage production, where shifting scenes between the past and present can be achieved with lighting and moods. Yet in film, for some reason, it is not as easy to recreate the kind of memories and consciousness of the past inside a person's head. In any case, Kazan had a helluva time making these clunky sequences work without causing a viewer to think she'd stumbled into a little theater production of O'Neill's
Strange Interlude.
BTW, my favorite sequence in the film features The Public Eddie Anderson vs. The Naked (and therefore REAL) Eddie Anderson in one of his interior monologues that is given literal life by a side by side shot that I've never quite forgotten...