New Movies: The Crack-up

The Arrangement is the ironic title of Elia Kazan’s novel of life at the top. Superficially, Eddie Anderson has neatly compartmentalized his California career: the nagging wife in the giant house, the piquant mistress in the tidy pad. The big advertising job for loot, the little magazine articles for integrity. But below the skin everything is in disarray: the marriage is passionless and the mistress has a talent for gelding. Eddie’s work—and ultimately his whole life —is a monumental counterfeit. Hence Eddie’s lengthy crack-up and his flight back East to redemption.

The film version, produced, directed and written by Kazan, offers new ironies. On the surface, The Arrangement is just that; actors were hired, a script prepared, film shot. But the result is a convulsive derangement of style and execution. As Eddie, Kirk Douglas displays all the external verities—the straining for vanished youth, the mindless drive, the conflict of narcissism and self-loathing. But since he begins at a manic, deafening level, he has nowhere to grow. He is not alone. Under Kazan’s pressure, shouts substitute for drama, and confrontations are endlessly repeated in place of plot. As Eddie’s wife. Deborah Kerr is restricted to arias of self-sorrow; as her rival, Faye Dunaway is properly erotic, but she turns her siren to a fever pitch and leaves it there for two hours.

The rest of the cast seems chosen with destructive whimsy. The admen are run-it-up-the-flagpole vaulters who were long ago caricatured to dramatic death. Whatever the novel’s faults, the scenes between Eddie and his senile Greek father were legitimate and moving. In the film, the patriarch is heavily overplayed by Richard Boone, whose accent is a festival of grunts. The Andersons’ family lawyer was also a key character in the novel; Hume Cronyn plays the part as a nasal sneak on the order of Maxwell Smart.

Gored by Jackals. Customarily, such misinterpretations could be yawned away with the rest of the film. But Director Kazan has been responsible for some of the most sustained and disciplined performances in the American cinema—including Marlon Brando’s A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront and Anthony Quinn’s Viva Zapata. In The Arrangement, he has not even managed to keep intact the surface —much less the mood—of his own book. At one moment it is painfully obvious symbolism; a television program, for instance, shows a giraffe being gored by a pack of jackals just before the admen come to see Eddie. At another it is daytime soap opera, as Eddie’s mistress tersely barks: “I’m trying to clean you out of me.” In between, Kazan wedges scenes from his 1963 movie America America, includes maladroit trick shots of Eddie lecturing himself on morals, and even throws in a couple of camp, ersatz Batman shots during an imaginary fight, with POW! and BIFF! cluttering the screen.

The Arrangement has been appraised as semi-autobiography. If so, it signals trouble far more disturbing than anything told in the script. After this Arrangement, the only way to true redemption is for all concerned to make another movie—fast.