The Arrangement (1969 film)

The Arrangement
Directed by	Elia Kazan
Produced by	Elia Kazan
Written by	Novel/screenplay:; Elia Kazan
Starring	Kirk Douglas ; Faye Dunaway ; Deborah Kerr ; Richard Boone ; Hume Cronyn
Music by	David Amram
Cinematography	Robert Surtees
Edited by	Stefan Arnsten
Production; company	Warner Bros.
Distributed by	Warner Bros.-Seven Arts
Release date	November 18, 1969(US);
Running time	125 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Box office	$4 million (US/Canada rentals) [1]

Last updated April 19, 2019

The Arrangement is a 1969 film drama directed by Elia Kazan, based upon his 1967 novel of the same title.

A film director is a person who directs the making of a film. A film director controls a film's artistic and dramatic aspects and visualizes the screenplay while guiding the technical crew and actors in the fulfilment of that vision. The director has a key role in choosing the cast members, production design, and the creative aspects of filmmaking. Under European Union law, the director is viewed as the author of the film.

Elia Kazan was a Greek-American director, producer, writer and actor, described by The New York Times as "one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history".

The Arrangement is a 1967 novel by Elia Kazan, narrated by a successful Greek-American advertising executive and magazine writer living in an affluent Los Angeles suburb who suffers a nervous breakdown due to the stress of the way in which he has lived his life – the "arrangement" of the title. In 1969 Kazan made it into a film. The Arrangement was a best-seller and garnered generally favorable reviews but it has been out of print since the 1980s.

Advertising is a marketing communication that employs an openly sponsored, non-personal message to promote or sell a product, service or idea. Sponsors of advertising are typically businesses wishing to promote their products or services. Advertising is differentiated from public relations in that an advertiser pays for and has control over the message. It differs from personal selling in that the message is non-personal, i.e., not directed to a particular individual. Advertising is communicated through various mass media, including traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, television, radio, outdoor advertising or direct mail; and new media such as search results, blogs, social media, websites or text messages. The actual presentation of the message in a medium is referred to as an advertisement, or "ad" or advert for short.

Kirk Douglas is an American actor, filmmaker, and author. A centenarian, he is one of the last surviving stars of the film industry's Golden Age. After an impoverished childhood with immigrant parents and six sisters, he had his film debut in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) with Barbara Stanwyck. Douglas soon developed into a leading box-office star throughout the 1950s, known for serious dramas, including westerns and war movies. During his career, he appeared in more than 90 movies. Douglas is known for his explosive acting style.

Eddie is suicidal and slowly having a psychotic breakdown. He is miserable at home in his marriage to his wife, Florence, played by Deborah Kerr, and with his career. He is engaged in a torrid affair with his mistress and co-worker Gwen (Faye Dunaway), and is forced to re-evaluate his life and its priorities while dealing with his willful and aging father (Richard Boone).

Deborah Jane Trimmer CBE, known professionally as Deborah Kerr, was a Scottish-born film, theatre and television actress. During her international film career, she won a Golden Globe Award for her performance as Anna Leonowens in the musical film The King and I (1956) and a Sarah Siddons Award for her performance as Laura Reynolds in the play Tea and Sympathy. She was also a three-time winner of the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress.

Dorothy Faye Dunaway is an American actress. She has won an Academy Award, three Golden Globes, a BAFTA, and an Emmy, and was the first recipient of a Leopard Club Award that honors film professionals whose work has left a mark on the collective imagination. In 2011, the government of France made her an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters.

Richard Allen Boone was an American actor who starred in over 50 films and was notable for his roles in Westerns, including his starring role in the television series Have Gun – Will Travel.

Plot

Wealthy ad man Eddie Anderson makes a suicide attempt in his car. He is contemptuous of life and its "arrangements." His long marriage to Florence is now devoid of passion, and he has become the lover of Gwen, a research assistant at his Los Angeles advertising agency. He descends into a long depression and silence, often conjuring up memories or hallucinations of Gwen.

A psychiatrist, Dr. Leibman, eventually listens to stories of Eddie's nightmares and general discontent with life. Eddie returns to work, where he insults a valued client. He pilots a small plane about L.A. and buzzes its skyscrapers recklessly, causing the police to be called. His mental stability is now seriously in doubt. His wife also sees compromising photographs of Eddie and Gwen.

Arthur, his lawyer, gives wife Florence power of attorney as Eddie travels to New York to visit Sam Arness, his ill father. The father is so sick that Eddie's brother and sister-in-law want him placed in an institution. Gwen is also in New York now, living with a man named Charles and telling Eddie of many other affairs that she has had. She has a baby that she claims is not Eddie's (but it is strongly implied she's lying).

A delusional Eddie begins to have conversations with his alter ego. Arthur brings papers for him to sign, turning over all of his community property to Florence, but she tells him not to sign them, and it turns out he signed someone else's name. Florence and Eddie have a long intense conversation, in which Eddie says he just wants to do nothing for a while—Florence simply can't understand this, and says he's insane. He sets fire to his father's house and comes to Gwen's apartment, where Charles shoots him—after this, Eddie is committed to a psychiatric hospital, but can release himself at any time, simply by proving he's got a job and a home to go to.

Eddie seems to feel contentment in his solitude at the asylum, but Gwen brings the baby to see him, and manages to lure him outside to try again, saying she's got a job for him. At his father's funeral, Florence and Gwen are both there and see each other for the first time, and Florence seems to grudgingly accept the relationship between Eddie and Gwen as the only way Eddie can be saved from himself.

Cast

Kirk Douglas as Eddie Anderson
Faye Dunaway as Gwen
Deborah Kerr as Florence
Richard Boone as Sam
Hume Cronyn as Arthur
Harold Gould as Dr. Leibman
Carol Rossen as Gloria
John Randolph Jones as Charles
Dianne Hull as Ellen Anderson
Charles Drake as Finnegan
Barry Sullivan as Chet Collier (uncredited)

Hume Blake Cronyn Jr., OC was a Canadian actor of stage and screen, who enjoyed a long career, often appearing professionally alongside Jessica Tandy, his wife of over fifty years.

Harold Vernon Gould was an American character actor. He appeared as Martin Morgenstern on the sitcom Rhoda (1974–78) and Miles Webber on the sitcom The Golden Girls (1989–92). A five-time Emmy Award nominee, Gould acted in film and television for nearly 50 years, appearing in more than 300 television shows, 20 major motion pictures, and over 100 stage plays. He was known for playing elegant, well-dressed men, and he regularly played Jewish characters and grandfather-type figures on television and in film.

Dianne Hull is an actress whose film career began in 1969 and ended in the early 1990s. The films she has acted in include Aloha, Bobby and Rose, The Arrangement, Christmas Evil, The Onion Field and The Fifth Floor.

Production

Kazan wanted Eddie to be portrayed by Marlon Brando, who Kazan felt could bring a greater depth to the role and bring it close to the character portrayed in the novel and who had experienced great success with Kazan previously in the films A Streetcar Named Desire , Viva Zapata! , and On the Waterfront . However, Brando refused to take the role, stating that he had no interest in making a film so soon after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Kazan felt this to be a dodge on Brando's part and wondered if the real reasons had more to do with Brando's increasing weight or receding hairline.

Marlon Brando Jr. was an American actor and film director. With a career spanning 60 years, he is well-regarded for his cultural influence on 20th-century film. Brando's Academy Award-winning performances include that of Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront (1954) and Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather (1972). Brando was an activist for many causes, notably the civil rights movement and various Native American movements. He is credited with helping to popularize the Stanislavski system of acting, having studied with Stella Adler in the 1940s. He is often regarded as one of the first actors to bring Method Acting to mainstream audiences.

A Streetcar Named Desire is a 1951 American drama film, adapted from Tennessee Williams's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1947 play of the same name. It tells the story of a southern belle, Blanche DuBois, who, after encountering a series of personal losses, leaves her aristocratic background seeking refuge with her sister and brother-in-law in a dilapidated New Orleans tenement. The Broadway production and cast was converted to film with several changes.

Viva Zapata! is a 1952 biographical film directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando. The screenplay was written by John Steinbeck, using Edgcomb Pinchon's book Zapata the Unconquerable as a guide. The cast includes Jean Peters and, in an Academy Award-winning performance, Anthony Quinn.

Reception

Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that it "reeks with slightly absurd movie chic but, unlike Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind or Vincente Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town , it's not only not much fun, but it's a mess of borrowed styles. What's worse is that it may be largely incomprehensible, on a simple narrative level, unless one has read Kazan's best-selling, 543-page short story that the director has more or less synopsized in his movie."^[2] Variety called it "a confused, overly-contrived and overlength film peopled with a set of characters about whom the spectator couldn't care less."^[3] Roger Ebert gave the film 2.5 stars out of 4 in a more mixed review, writing that it was "one of those long, ponderous, star-filled 'serious' films that were popular in the 1950s, before we began to value style more highly than the director's good intentions. It isn't successful, particularly not on Kazan's terms (he sees it, doubtless, as a bitter sermon on the consequences of selling out). But it does draw nourishment from the remarkable performances of Kirk Douglas and Faye Dunaway."^[4] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave it 2 stars out of 4, writing that Kazan "fails to give us a clear characterization of Eddie or the people in his life. What tensions are revealed are clouded by basic directing errors ... It would be nice to excuse Kazan's direction by saying that he was forced to jazz up a weak script, but he wrote the script too."^[5] Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote, "If one did not know that Kazan is a major figure in films, one would find nothing in the way this movie has been made to suggest it. The direction is tight and almost cruelly coercive of the actors. There's nothing in this movie that looks spontaneous, either in the direction or the acting. The actors have no life of their own as performers, no trace of invention; they're just shouting ciphers, acting out ready-made popular ideas about selling out."^[6] Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "The personal passion which informed the novel is still present in the movie, but on the screen the passion is so compromised and weakened by what passes for technique and invention that it becomes only an intermittent echo."^[7] Tony Mastroianni in The Cleveland Press referred to the film as a "bad novel [that] didn't improve very much in the transfer [to film].^[8] Philip Strick of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote that the film "turns out to have said no more in 125 minutes than it stated during the first six."^[9]

Vincent Canby was an American film and theatre critic who served as the chief film critic for The New York Times from 1969 until the early 1990s, then its chief theatre critic from 1994 until his death in 2000. He reviewed more than one thousand films during his tenure there.

<i>The New York Times</i> Daily broadsheet newspaper based in New York City

The New York Times is an American newspaper based in New York City with worldwide influence and readership. Founded in 1851, the paper has won 127 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other newspaper. The Times is ranked 17th in the world by circulation and 2nd in the U.S.

Douglas Sirk was a German film director best known for his work in Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s.

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References

↑ "Big Rental Films of 1969", Variety, 7 January 1970 p 15
↑ Canby, Vincent (November 19, 1969). "Screen: Kazan's 'The Arrangement'". The New York Times : 48.
↑ "The Arrangement". Variety : 22. November 19, 1969.
↑ Ebert, Roger (December 24, 1969). "The Arrangement". RogerEbert.com . Retrieved November 21, 2018.
↑ Siskel, Gene (December 25, 1969). "Kazan's 'The Arrangement'". Chicago Tribune . Section 2, p. 8.
↑ Kael, Pauline (November 22, 1969). "The Current Cinema". The New Yorker : 216.
↑ Champlin, Charles (December 19, 1969). "'Arrangement' Faint Echo of Kazan Book". Los Angeles Times . Part IV, p. 1.
↑ Mastroionni, Tony (December 26, 1969). "Kazan's "Arrangement" Is Waste of Time". The Cleveland Memory Project. Retrieved November 21, 2018.
↑ Strick, Philip (March 1970). "The Arrangement". The Monthly Film Bulletin . 37 (434): 44.

External links

The Arrangement on IMDb
Elia Kazan on IMDb

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[1] "Big Rental Films of 1969", Variety, 7 January 1970 p 15

[2] Canby, Vincent (November 19, 1969). "Screen: Kazan's 'The Arrangement'". The New York Times : 48.

[3] "The Arrangement". Variety : 22. November 19, 1969.

[4] Ebert, Roger (December 24, 1969). "The Arrangement". RogerEbert.com . Retrieved November 21, 2018.

[5] Siskel, Gene (December 25, 1969). "Kazan's 'The Arrangement'". Chicago Tribune . Section 2, p. 8.

[6] Kael, Pauline (November 22, 1969). "The Current Cinema". The New Yorker : 216.

[7] Champlin, Charles (December 19, 1969). "'Arrangement' Faint Echo of Kazan Book". Los Angeles Times . Part IV, p. 1.

[8] Mastroionni, Tony (December 26, 1969). "Kazan's "Arrangement" Is Waste of Time". The Cleveland Memory Project. Retrieved November 21, 2018.

[9] Strick, Philip (March 1970). "The Arrangement". The Monthly Film Bulletin . 37 (434): 44.