A few words on "The Arrangement"

Kirk and Kirk

On May 25^th I had the hon­or of present­ing, at the great NY movie­house The Metrograph, Elia Kazan’s 1969 The Arrangement. These are the pro­gram notes for the show: 

“Plastic people! Oh baby now you’re such a drag!” So bel­lowed The Mothers of Invention in 1967. That same year Elia Kazan issued a not dis­sim­il­ar cri de coeur in his doorstop-size nov­el “The Arrangement,” which he adap­ted into a film two years later. In Kazan’s com­plaint,  Kirk Douglas’ com­puls­ively adul­ter­ous ad exec mounts his own rebel­lion against a val­ues sys­tem that has made him afflu­ent but empty. Is this a frantic, truc­u­lent indul­gence? A film maudit of monu­ment­al pro­por­tions? Kazan’s own Skidoo? You have see this rarely-screened curio to find out.

A few of you out there have been kind enough to inquire if I could make my pre-screening remarks avail­able in prose form. I worked from what I regard as loose notes, but I cleaned them up into some­thing resem­bling what I said and/or an actu­al text. See below. 

In my pro­gram notes I quoted Frank Zappa’s “Plastic People.” Here’s anoth­er Zappa quote: “You’re prob­ably won­der­ing why I’m here.”

Why The Arrangement? Why now?

This screen­ing came about as a res­ult of some cas­u­al con­ver­sa­tions I had with Jake Perlin, one of the pro­gram­mers here. I had a book idea I’d been toy­ing with, about the Great Hollywood Directors— Hitchcock, Preminger, Wyler, Kazan, and more — and the ways that they, and their work, reacted begin­ning in the early ‘60s when (and Preminger’s efforts had a lot to do with this in the first place) the Production Code imploded and these film­makers had the free­dom to do things that they’d nev­er been allowed to do. In Hitchcock’s case, for instance, you have the mor­bidly expli­cit rape scene of Frenzy. With Preminger you have the explor­a­tions of Skidoo and the Burgess Meredith nude scene in Such Good Friends. With Kazan, you have The Arrangement.

Now this movie didn’t start with a com­pul­sion to break bound­ar­ies in film­mak­ing. Kazan, in the mid ‘60s, had what he con­sidered a pro­found sense of dis­sat­is­fac­tion in his life which he channeled into a nov­el, which happened to coin­cide with a shift­ing zeit­geist. His mar­riage to Molly Kazan had ended with her death in 1963; he sub­sequently mar­ried Barbara Loden in 1967. He had a lot of tor­tured feel­ings con­cern­ing both rela­tion­ships, which he details in his fas­cin­at­ing auto­bi­o­graphy. In The Arrangement he wrestles with not just those feel­ings but a lar­ger dis­gust with the phoni­ness of American life. Status sym­bols, afflu­ence, their stifling influ­ence on inter­per­son­al rela­tion­ships, par­tic­u­larly those of love. Which were com­ing into col­li­sion with the coun­ter­cul­ture, which believed love should be free.

Now you’re won­der­ing if Jake and I were dis­cuss­ing these issues. No.

This pro­gram was sup­posed to have been a double fea­ture. The second fea­ture was to have been 1960’s Strangers When We Meet, dir­ec­ted by Richard Quine and star­ring Kirk Douglas, Kim Novak, Barbara Rush, Ernie Kovacs and Walter Matthau. Written by Evan Hunter, whose estate, we have dis­covered, now retains the rights to the film.

Quine is what a friend of mine has called a  “major minor” Hollywood dir­ect­or and Strangers is one of his best, a work of great sens­it­iv­ity and pres­ci­ence. While The Arrangement knocks over its meta­phors like a drunk enter­ing a darkened liv­ing room and stum­bling over the fur­niture, Strangers brings a real deft­ness to the whole work/love/integrity theme. And its treat­ment of insi­di­ous sex­ism —Kim Novak’s char­ac­ter is all but per­se­cuted for look­ing like, well, Kim Novak — is also very sharp.

So that was sup­posed to be the idea — the sexu­al revolu­tion, 1960 and 1969, with Kirk Douglas the icon­ic brack­et­ing. But we could not find a 35 print of Strangers, so here we are.

One of the rather nas­ti­er fea­tures of The Arrangement is its treat­ment of Deborah Kerr. If you thought her hav­ing to almost yodel “Doodle me James” in the 1966  Casino Royale was undig­ni­fied, get a load of what she goes through here.  Kazan’s nov­el put across a cer­tain amount of com­plex­ity on top of its baseline sex­ism, but in the film this too often trans­lates into an atti­tude of  “Why must I, a new man with new ideas, be saddled with an OLD WIFE?”

The movie’s pre-echoes of Network are not lim­ited to a par­tic­u­lar mani­fest­a­tion of miso­gyny, but with Faye Dunaway as the object of desire that qual­ity is hard to ignore. Neither film both­ers to recog­nize that it’s the male-constructed power struc­tures that help make the bitches that so bewitch the hap­less middle-aged male. At least Strangers tries to bust its char­ac­ters out of cir­cum­scribed gender roles, recog­nizes the oppression.

Michael Higgins, later  of Wanda, plays the Douglas character’s broth­er Michael; look for an uncred­ited Barry Sullivan…Richard Boone, six months young­er than Douglas, plays Douglas’ dad, and look, there’s prac­tic­ally teen­age Michael Murphy as a priest!

Just when you think it’s peaked, the movie  gets weirder. When Dunaway is set­ting a table for Douglas and Boone you may ask your­self, well, how did I get here?

Joni Mitchell was com­mis­sioned to write a song for the movie, and she did. It wasn’t used in the film, but the song “The Arrangement” appears on Court and Spark and bemoans the “cred­it card and the swim­ming pool in the backyard.”

REACTIONS

From the NYPL Perf Arts clip­pings file…

Judith Crist: “126 minutes of sturm, drang and banal­ity and about as tur­gid a job of soap-suds cinema to be found out­side of Peyton Place reruns”

“The sight of a 44-year-old wal­low­ing in self-searchings that would embar­rass today’s 14-year-old by its simple-mindedness is simply boring”

“As a neo­phyte nov­el­ist, Kazan was entitled to a trash wal­low, but his spread­ing The Arrangement over the big screen is inex­cus­able”  — New York mag Nov 24, 1969

John Simon: “ a sense­less and banal story that reels from plat­it­ude to platitude”

My old friend Joseph Failla wrote to me:  “You sure don’t pick the easy ones to present, I’ve seen THE ARRANGEMENT and thought it was great. I know late Kazan becomes dif­fi­cult but I’ve nev­er under­stood Maltin’s bomb rat­ing either.Compelling from the open­ing moments till it’s dreamy, hal­lu­cin­at­ory con­clu­sion. My favor­ite touch, Kirk’s Batman style punch up in a bar.”

Not in a bar, as it hap­pens, but ima­gined by Kurt as he looks into Dunaway’s NYC apart­ment win­dow and sees a man (future Lars von Trier day play­er John Randolph Jones) in there.