Some pretty big names, right at, near, or just past their peaks... kazan, douglas, dunaway, kerr, cronyn. Ed anderson is an ad man. (the irony of the "clean" cigarette campaign.) he has a midlife crisis. And of course, we flash back to what brought him to this point. Everyone wants to know what really caused it... the doctors, the therapists, coworkers, his wife. At the center of all this is gwen, the office "assistant", who doesn't have any clear duties. And now eddie wants to take care of his father, who has dementia. It's a psychological-thinker film. Izzokay. Moves pretty slowly. And gets pretty heavy. Lots of yelling. It's all well done, but i can understand why people thought it was such a downer. And so long. Keep an eye out for harold gould.. he was "miles" on golden girls. Written and directed by elia kazan. According to the trivia section, this kind of became his swan song.

This film is over a half century old now, and it may be time for a revisionist review. Yes, it's messy and somewhat confusing, but considering it's about a dysfunctional man reviewing his dysfunctional life while living it, the film speaks for all those who go through life hating their job, hating their relationships, and hating the way they try to deal with it all. Eddie Anderson (Kirk Douglas) really does epitomize a guy on the brink, who's success as an advertising executive comes back to haunt him every time he hears or sees a commercial for Zephyr cigarettes. His convoluted life almost ends when he plays chicken with a couple of big rigs on a city highway, and by the film's end, he's awaiting the outcome of a mental hospital's board of review to determine his fate. Everything in between is a smorgasbord of failure and deceit, unable to cope with the cards he's dealt himself in life. Not a pretty picture, which describes both Eddie and the film.

A sort of precursor to American Beauty and other modern fillms about dissatisfaction, Kazan's The Arrangment is an interesting attempt to characterize a man's deconstruction. Kirk Douglas plays Eddie, an advertising executive coming to terms with his job, his family, and his life's direction. Kazan experiments with montage, split narrative, and time span as he tells the story of a man looking for something new in life. The result is a compelling and relevant story about modern happiness that is broken apart by bizarre construction and confusing shot arrangement. Kazan has some interesting ideas here, but not all of them work. His split-consciousness portrayal of Eddie is sometimes confusing and distracting, as is the switch between past and present. Douglas is good as the lead; I don't see why Kazan would have chosen Brando in retrospect as I don't think it would have made much of a difference. Overall, a film worth seeing if you're a Kazan-freak, but otherwise stick with Streetcar, Eden, or Waterfront..