The Arrangement

The Arrangement

Elia Kazan’s “The Arrangement” is one of those long, star-studded and ponderous “serious” movies of the fifties, when we still valued good intentions in directors more than style. It doesn’t succeed not on Kazan’s terms, anyway (he probably sees it as a bitter sermon on selling out). But it does have Kirk Douglas and Faye Dunaway.

Indeed, they’re the best things in it. They achieve effects even when Kazan’s script is most awkward. And an awkward script it is uncomfortable with anything that isn’t obvious. He tells the story of a talented man (Douglas) who sells his soul to an advertising agency and nearly kills himself trying to buy it back. His crisis comes when his mistress (Dunaway) denounces him and his “value system” and sends him into a re-examination of his empty life and empty wife (Deborah Kerr).

This is, as you might imagine, exactly the kind of story they would make in the 1950s; but it isn’t so much the story as Kazan’s tone that goes wrong. He gives Douglas scene after scene of anguished self-analysis, hysterics, blame, guilt disintegration. By the time he has analyzed the cause of his crisis (it’s his mother’s fault), we feel like we’ve been through this thing ourselves once or twice before; especially since Kazan jumps around in time so much just when we think we’re getting somewhere, he slips in a flashback and we’re right back where we were.

But Kirk Douglas and Faye Dunaway move through this confusion with such assurance that their characters seem real to us, and so for a time does their movie. Douglas has been around too long and made too many movies (this is his 49th) for us to see him freshly any more; but this isn’t a “Kirk Douglas performance,” it’s an acting job, and he does it well from the materials supplied him by Kazan, and sustains it despite the handicaps with which Kazan was equally generous.

Douglas’ best scenes are his love scenes with Miss Dunaway, whose acting is not only up to par with her work in “Bonnie and Clyde,” but is indeed the only good acting she has done since then. The reason they’re good together, I think, is that there’s so much intelligence at work on the screen.

When Douglas, an intelligent actor if not a subtle one, plays opposite Deborah Kerr (to whom subtlety comes easily), we don’t feel there’s anybody there; Miss Kerr keeps even her emptiness in reserve. But Faye Dunaway interacts well and sensitively with Douglas, and their affair has a separate life (almost apart from the confusion of the main event) that is involving and real.

Even Douglas cannot quite pull off several scenes of hysteria and wall climbing; Kazan seems reluctant to direct personal confrontations below a dull roar. Finally the movie pounds at our moral sense so much that our moral sense tires and becomes defensive, and all we can do is be grateful for Miss Dunaway’s beauty, and the way she doesn’t raise her voice.

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