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Highly Overrated But Still Good

Did you people see the same film I saw?

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

I had a strange feeling, as I watched Kirk Douglas speeding down the highways of L.A. to his own "Zephyr" cigarette ads, that I was watching a movie I had already seen -- even though I've never heard of "the Arrangement" until I found the video last week at the library. The premise of the movie is so familiar as to lead one to speculate that it is, in itself, an ironic reflection on the banal. Douglas plays a middle-aged advertising executive having a midlife crisis, trying to kill himself, saying and doing "crazy" things, having a lot of sex with Faye Dunaway's character, and way too many prolonged bedroom arguments with his wife, played by Deborah Kerr. Even though the story is dull, it's a somewhat gripping movie because it's so stylish, and because Dunaway and Douglas at least put in some pretty compelling performances. Sometimes I think that they were being too aggressive with the editing. It reminded me of Sergio Leone or something, which isn't necessarily an insult, but this movie didn't have enough action to justify all the cross- cutting. A lot of it just feels manipulative, and kind of cheap, like the scene where he uses editing to "switch" Dunaway with Kerr. It's also an uneven narrative, because the whole second half of the movie ends up having to do with Douglas' relationship with his father (Richard Boone), who doesn't even show up in the first half. Kerr's stuck in a pretty thankless role ultimately, too. It's a movie that shouldn't be as good as it is. I don't think I would want to read the novel, but once he got out there on the set with the actors Kazan made a decent film out of it. Boone's performance is particularly surprising, to me anyway. But it's not a good movie, overall. Kirk Douglas has been on the same terrain too many times. I thought "Two Weeks in Another Town" was a much more compelling film, from about a decade earlier. And we've seen the rapacious and soul-less side of Douglas too, before, in "The Bad and the Beautiful" and "Champion" and other films. What's interesting about the film is Dunaway's character, and how she breaks down his persona. I would have enjoyed the film more if it wasn't so hung up on making Douglas the "good guy." We've seen that enough times too.

At first blush, The Arrangement seems to be about a middle-aged man who's juggling two women in his life, a wife and a mistress. You know, they all have an "arrangement." But it's much more of an existential, mid-life-crisis movie. Kirk Douglas stars as ad exec Eddie Anderson who has an epiphany after wrecking his car in a New York City tunnel, leading him to reevaluate his priorities. Deborah Kerr stars as his wife, Florence, and Faye Dunaway is the iconoclastic girlfriend, Gwen.Told from Eddie's point of view, the film moves back and forth between the present and various earlier moments in the man's life, including his childhood as the son of a Persian rug dealer (Richard Boone) and his earlier days at the ad agency, where he meets Gwen, a looker whose opinions are valued by the company's president. Eddie is, by the present day and according to him, locked into a strict course of by-the-book, humdrum listlessness. Although the movie doesn't use the specific phrase, Eddie wants to drop out of society - this during a time in real life when people were doing exactly that. (It was the late 1960s, after all.) A year prior to the release of The Arrangement, Douglas' best buddy Burt Lancaster appeared in a similar movie, called The Swimmer. That one was based on a John Cheever story; The Arrangement is based on director Elia Kazan's own best-selling novel, which was widely panned by critics. As was the movie adaptation - some thought that Douglas' performance was a little flat and superficial. I think that's nonsense. Douglas is terrific in a very meaty role. But even better than Kirk Douglas are his two leading ladies. Dunaway is unforgettable as the independent Gwen; this was about two years after her breakthrough role in Bonnie and Clyde, so it was a bit of a boon to get her on board. She knocks this role out of the park. And Kerr, who had been making movies for a couple of decades but looked every bit as lovely and elegant as an ingenue. Hers, like Dunaway's and Douglas's, is also a multilayered role.

I wasn't expecting much out of the film, but wanted to see the performance of Dunaway and Kirk Douglas. Douglas indeed gives a very good performance and Dunaway is still gorgeous looking. The cinematography and backdrops are beautiful as well. I can tell a lot of work was put in those areas. Unfortunately that's about where it ends.Eddie Anderson (Douglas) suffers from a midlife crisis and takes on a mistress, Dunaway. There are quite a few problems with the film. The storytelling is convoluted and the method of telling it is very dry. The thing that bothers me the most are the jump cuts involving the mind of Eddie. You don't know whether he's is fantasizing about his relationship with Dunaway or whether it is merely a flashback. Other editing problems involve premature cutting of a scene. I do understand that the late sixties were very much an experimental age and a lot of today's advanced storytelling can be credited to films of that era. The Arrangement tries to comedic at times, but that doesn't work either. The acting is generally over the top, particularly that of Eddie's father who gives a horrid performance. In fact, few of the cast members really mesh. The dialog and delivery of lines is dated 50s cliché. It will put you to sleep. This bit of dialog at the end, with Faye and Eddie together, stuck out like a sore thumb: Faye's former lover burst in, shoots Eddie and says "I like you to". Kazan's career was coming to an end and this film showed it.

Old-fashioned melodrama longing to be flashy and modern. Director Elia Kazan, adapting his own bestseller, has assembled a terrific cast in story of a 44-year-old married advertising executive with a mistress who attempts suicide. Cold and detached, the film wants us to sympathize with a lot of people we might normally recoil from: the rich and privileged who live in a well-heeled vacuum. As Kirk Douglas' other woman, Faye Dunaway, who was featured in a slew of pictures from 1967-1969, was perilously at risk of being overexposed. She's gorgeously coiffed and manicured here, but her impassive face and personality don't involve the audience--and all of Douglas' striding up and down over her seems like a wasting disease. Kazan wants us to see the unsavory nature of these people, the office sharks and their suffering wives at the mercy of their whims, but the bitter 'truth' behind his portrait is heightened--just as it was in pictures like "Peyton Place"--and after a while it all begins to seem like a rancid put-on. ** from ****