From 20th Century Fox
Directed by Martin Ritt
Starring
Joanne Woodward
Sheree North
Tony Randall
Jeffrey Hunter
Cameron Mitchell
Patricia Owens
Patricia Owens
Barbara Rush
Pat Hingle
Here is an unvarnished look at four couples living in a California subdivision (Sunrise Hills: a better place for better living) whose dreams of upward mobility come crashing down amidst heartbreak and despair. Slipped in are marital infidelity, rape, alcoholism, domestic abuse and racial prejudice. It is beautifully directed by Martin Ritt with his strong social conscience and thoughtful study of relationships. The director always had a strong attachment to his characters.
The story opens with newlyweds Jeffrey Hunter and Patricia Owens moving into their new home. He is in the electronics game and devoted to his job... too devoted. He acts like he's been married for 10 years and she seems like she's in the dreamy dating phase. She's a pretty one, knows it and flaunts it. He quietly boils as he sees other men flirt and dance with her. She'd like him to take a stronger stance.
Despite the fact that Owens doesn't care for how much attention Hunter puts on his work, she is ambitious and wants him to stop fooling around with science and seek out that sales job within his company because the bucks are better.
They live next door (literally about three steps away) from a couple of Tennessee hillbillies, Cameron Mitchell and Joanne Woodward. Another neighbor refers to them as Daisy Mae and Lil Abner. He is a war vet who has still not adjusted to civilian life. His spotless garage is loaded with Japanese flags, swords, etc. A gas jockey who wants to become the town's chief of police, he feels outrage when he's turned down due to having no college. (Another character says it won't be long before we'll need a college education to clean toilets.)
Woodward is embittered as well because earlier in their relationship, she had a baby and he forced her to give it up for adoption because he didn't believe it was his.
Other than sex, they don't appear to have much in common.
Across the back patio lives Pat Hingle and Barbara Rush. He runs a hardware store and their big issue at first is that he will not attend church with her. She is further annoyed that while she's praying, he's washing the car out on the street in front of their home. Other than this, he seems to want to please her and their marriage seems to be the strongest.
It's through them that racial prejudice comes up. His best employee and friend is a Japanese man who wants to move into Sunrise Hills but needs Hingle's help to do so. (In the novel on which the movie is based, this character is black but it was thought the Japanese angle would have more meaning with the numerous references to WWII.) Hingle brings the issue home to his wife who invalidates the entire notion because Sunrise Hills' residents will be up in arms.
Tony Randall and Sheree North are the fourth couple. He is an alcoholic used car salesman who doesn't want to work at all. Still, somehow, he has grandiose ideas about becoming a millionaire (his explaining to her how that will happen is very sad indeed). She is exasperated by his delusions of grandeur and by the end of the film is considering leaving him.
Despite the money problems that all four couples seem to have at some level, none of the women work. Two couples also have no children. The issue of wives staying at home is not addressed because of the time frame of the story. So much of this story reminds me of my childhood and my mother worked but it can be duly noted that men were fairly opposed to their wives working back then.
In my posting on Marty Ritt I said that No Down Payment is a soap opera. I'm not now backing out of that but admit that after having just watched it again, I find it to be more than that. The film is unrelenting in the points it wants to drive home. It delights in wanting to nail conformity to the cross along with economic pressures and the tensions associated with the pursuit of upward mobility. It promotes the feeling that nobody's gonna get out of Sunrise Hills alive.
I was a kid during the Eisenhower era. The couples in the film gather during the standard BBQs just like I remember attending with my parents back then. While the booze flowed the men talked about the war and the Cubs and the Cardinals and their cars and the wife of any man who left the area to go refill his hi-ball glass. Women were inside preparing various dishes and talked of their children, gossiped about neighbors not invited, talked of sales at the various department stores, compared how many S&H Green Stamps booklets they'd filled, tried to catch their breath over salacious stories in Confidential Magazine and lowered their voices when badmouthing their husbands. I know. I was creeping between the various groupings, catching it all.
I always marveled at how the adults wanted to dress up during these BBQ outings. Men wore their shirts out but they were never T-shirts. Pants were kind of dressy. Vaseline Hair Tonic caressed every follicle. The mothers were in their pretty, pastel sundresses and women without kids liked their pedal pushers. Mom buzzed around collecting empty glasses, dumping full ashtrays into a butler and replenishing snack trays. Mothers, with more to do than their husbands, usually also had the child-management duties.
Oh yes, I relate to No Down Payment, although, then, from a child's point of view. It seems ironic that I liked the film when I intensely disliked what I saw and heard in real life. While the film is a California story, it didn't seem so different from what I saw living at that time in the Midwest. What I especially loved about the film was that it is decidedly a fifties' story. I thought writer Philip Yordan (and uncredited, blacklisted writer Ben Maddow) nailed it.
He nailed the banality of those times as well. The men all speak of what they hope to have rather than what they do have. That banality and the depressing lives they lead is highlighted in the black and white photography and the dreary sameness of their tacky house and plastic furnishings.
I don't think 20th Century Fox had a lot of faith in the film or had the ability to see its potential. They populated it with contract players, none of whom at the time was a big star and most never would be. Where they deserve the most credit is in their ensemble acting.
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| From L... North, Randall, Rush, Hingle, Mitchell, Woodward, Hunter, Owens |
The best work is unquestionably done by Randall in not only an unsympathetic role but a rare dramatic one. He is incredibly irritating as a loudmouthed drunk. Woodward is also noteworthy as much for her liveliness as anything else. Her receiving top billing shows the studio's great interest in her. It was only her fourth film and although she had just completed The Three Faces of Eve, she had not yet won her Oscar for it.
Mitchell is most effective as the sullen and dangerous war hero. He was a gritty villain in a number of films but could also easily deliver decent and loving characters in others. Hingle, in only his second film, already showed signs of his future prominence as a character actor (think Splendor in the Grass). Hunter barely registers, although had there been a sequel, he would have been the cherished neighborhood glamour boy.
The other wives, North, Owens and Rush, are perfectly fine in their roles. North and Rush aren't given a lot to do. Owens had the showiest role of the trio but to me she always held back as an actress which is undoubtedly why, despite Fox's efforts, she never achieved stardom.
The cast, particularly with most of them coming from the same studio, were friends or friendly and had already previously worked together or would again. Earlier in the year Randall and Rush costarred in Oh Men, Oh Women. Hunter and North had just finished making The Way to the Gold and the following year would make In Love and War. The prior year Hunter and Woodward made A Kiss Before Dying. Hunter and Owens would go on to make 1960's Hell to Eternity. While Hunter and Rush never worked together before or since, they had once been married to one another. Rush and Mitchell would work on Hombre (1967), also directed by Ritt.
This was Ritt's second film. Had he been a bigger name at the time or had the film been released a little later, I believe it would have gained more popularity. It is not as honored as, say, Rebel Without a Cause or All that Heaven Allows or Some Came Running, three other chroniclers of the decade, but this offered more on neighbors and cliques than the others did and is worth a look.
Here, meet the neighbors:
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Glittering Casts
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