Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Binding: VHS Tape EAN: 9786300269903 Format: Color, HiFi Sound, NTSC ISBN: 6300269906 Label: Warner Home Video Manufacturer: Warner Home Video Number Of Items: 1 Publisher: Warner Home Video Release Date: April 21, 1994 Running Time: 125 minutes Studio: Warner Home Video Theatrical Release Date: November 18, 1969 Sales Rank: 34401
Description: Kirk Douglas and Faye Dunaway in master moviemaker Elia Kazan's hard-hitting story about an adman's attempts to rebuild his shattered life after suffering a nervous breakdown. Year: 1969 Director: Elia Kazan Starring: Kirk Douglas, Faye Dunaway, Deborah Kerr
Amazon.com: During the grim, glum cacophony of images and sounds that constitutes the first few minutes of The Arrangement, a self-loathing advertising wizard (Kirk Douglas) with a stultifying marriage and a career focused on selling "Zephyr, The Clean Cigarette!" impulsively hits upon a spectacular method of committing suicide. Viewers would have been spared two hours of further flailing if he'd succeeded. Instead we get a combination psychodrama and Bildungsroman--at once crashingly obvious and fragmented to the point of incoherence--that attempts to frame the betrayal of the American Dream through the guilty/proud machismo, professional frustrations, and oppressive ethnic heritage of a very unappealing guy.
At least credit writer-director Elia Kazan, adapting his own bestselling novel, with honesty: the guy is, essentially, he himself. The once-great filmmaker hoped to reunite with Marlon Brando on the project; he wound up with Douglas, whose career-long image was the guy with the indomitable spirit no matter what ("I'm Spartacus!"). But dismay over Douglas's miscasting--which led to the miscasting of Faye Dunaway in a mistress role based on and intended for Barbara Loden--doesn't excuse the total mishmash. Scenes begin in the middle or break off without warning; some characters are introduced portentously, then abandoned or beaten as one-note Symbols. The technique is a mélange of ugly, puerile effects, including still photos absurdly sprung to life and a daydream sequence studded with BIFF! BAM! POW! comic-book titles. There's even a desperate dive into self-quotation, a snippet of Kazan's 1963 America America to establish that a character barely seen in The Arrangement is the aged version of the youthful protagonist of that exultant masterpiece.
For the record, the cast includes Deborah Kerr as Douglas's wife and Richard Boone as his terminally Old World dad. They didn't deserve to come off as badly as they do. --Richard T. Jameson
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - A Film Whose Time Has Come.
Panned and patronized at the time of it's initial release, Elia Kazan's adaptation of his best selling book THE ARRANGEMENT plays much better now than it did in 1969. Made after a 6 year hiatus from filmmaking ... Read More
Rating: - A Very Flawed Search for Truth
Elia Kazan has touched me deeply in many of his films. The Arrangement is not the most effective of Kazan's films, but he certainly tried very hard with this one to reach towards some important truths. I really ... Read More
Rating: - Convoluted At Best
I don't remember why I pre-ordered The Arrangement, and I have no idea how well it was received when it was first released in 1969, but one viewing told me that this film was riding only on the name recognition of ... Read More
Rating: - I'm Having A Breakdown SO YOU BETTER LISTEN TO ME!!!
This would have to be one of the worst movies that I have ever seen and I have sat through a lot of turkeys in my lifetime. It concerns an advertisng executive played by Kirk Douglas. Eddie is having a very bad Nervous ... Read More
Rating: - Slow and boring
Maybe I just did not get it. I sat through this thing because I have been a fan of Miss Dunaway's for quite some time. It is hard to sit through and makes little sense. Kirk Douglas is old and is messing around with ... Read More
- A Very Flawed Search for Truth
- Convoluted At Best
- Slow and boring