Very well executed

Touches You

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

. . . writer\director Elia Kazan into mapping out most of the Circles of Hell in THE ARRANGEMENT. On its surface this chick flick is Uninvolving and Drier than Flo's Complaint (literally, Deborah Kerr says that her character "Florence" cannot flow--that is, she "goes dry" Down There--when men touch her). But as you start to peel back the layers of Tinseltown Stool Pigeon Kazan's blistered soul, you begin to see the desperate Mea Culpa's Hell-Bound Rat Finks can sputter when they feel that first foot sinking and beginning to singe in their grave. Playing a thinly-veiled version of Back-Stabber Kazan himself, Kirk Douglas' "Eddie" accumulates a Fat Cat Fortune as a shill for "clean" Zephyr Cigarettes. Warner Bros. recognizes here that Joe Camel-type Ad-Men foisting off "coffin nails" upon gullible teens (in 1969 more than 85% of future Cancer Cadavers got hooked by the age of 14, thanks to fiends such as Eddie) is about the next worst thing to Kazan's Real Life Perfidy: joining his fellow Confederate Nazi Dregs of Society such as Ronnie Reagan, John "Il Duce" Wayne, Ward Bond, and Charlatan Heston to rat out and destroy hundreds of Progressive Hollywood Families, including that of Paul Revere's heiress Anne (offed as she galloped down Mulholland Drive screaming "The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming!"). As the 2016 Rigged Election proved, these Venal Fascist Thugs were the REAL Commies themselves, in league with the Corrupt Job-Killing Corporate One Per Centers since the formation of Ye Olde Soviet Union a century ago: that's the sordid ARRANGEMENT Warner Bros. tricks Kazan into confessing here.

How do you sugar-coat Cancer? Eddie Anderson (Kirk Douglas) does it by claiming the 'Zephyr' brand of cigarette (made by his ad company's million-dollar client) is CLEAN. Eddie has gotten rich by selling cigarettes, by selling Cancer (a word he goes out of his way to avoid saying), by saying cigarettes are CLEAN.That's why Eddie is unhappy, alienated, suicidal, and DIRTY.Elia Kazan (and yes, I too have conflicted feelings about the man) makes a film that shows an ad genius who gets rich and powerful, but he's guilt-stricken, and he takes himself down, even tries to take himself out.They still had cigarette advertising on radio and television back in 1969 (when this film was made), and you hear similar ads occasionally in this movie, extolling the pleasures and wonders of 'Zephyr' cigarettes, with copy written by Eddie Anderson himself... you heard those ads repeatedly, on Eddie's car radio, just before he drove his convertible sports car under the wheels of a tractor-trailer.It is a screed against advertising and selling cigarettes, wrapped in the mid-life crisis of a man who does just that, and it causes Eddie to walk away from his fabulously high-paying gig as an ad genius, in the process laughing right in the mortified faces of the cigarette company executives, telling them essentially "I can't do it anymore, I can't sell Cancer anymore."I give it nine stars, reluctantly taking one star away, due to what seemed a too fast narrative between the scene where Eddie has a serious and honest conversation in a hotel room with his wife (Deborah Kerr), which suddenly gets violent, and in the next scene he's appearing before an inquest of some kind, with his arm in a sling, and I wondered if he was hurt in the struggle with his wife, only to learn he was shot, TWICE, at the apartment of Gwen (Faye Dunaway), by the somewhat creepy Charles standing scarily in the shadows, followed shortly by a scene showing Eddie burning down his house.The speed of the narrative at that point almost gave me whiplash. I also thought it caught a little bit of the hip (hippie) look of the late sixties, primarily in Gwen's poster-decorated apartment.

The Arrangement (1969)You might say this movie is about a very successful man coming to realize his success means nothing in the big picture and all he wants is time to be himself, to enjoy life simply.Or you might say this is a movie about a man cheating on his wife with a younger woman and all the fallout that goes with that.Or you might say this is a psychoanalytical dive inward to a man realizing he was ruined by his parents and trapped by his wife, and he descent into introspection makes him go almost mad, and then mad. And he likes it that way.You might even say this is an exercise in narrative storytelling, with a virtuosic layering and intercutting of all these elements into a single highly complex tale.Kirk Douglas is the lynchpin to all of this, and The Arrangement, a masterpiece if there ever was one, is the merging of art-house cinema with mainstream Hollywood. Except that there was no real art-house movie scene in 1969. This film pushes the boundaries as hard as they could be and still survive at all as a mainstream release. Director Elia Kazan is certainly one of the greats of the era (Scorsese agrees here) and he went out on a limb with editor Stefan Arnsten to make something utterly unique. There are foreshadowings of Woody Allen (though without humor) and Six Feet Under (in the kind of surrealism created by editing and the changing presence of people in a single scene). The plot is also intensely personal. Kazan, born in Istanbul and brought to American when he was four, was the son of Greek immigrants and his father was actually a rug merchant. And Kazan was apparently having an affair at the time of the shooting (he remarried in 1969 and later had a child). The screenplay is Kazan's and it's based a 1967 novel, also by Kazan. So if this is a deeply felt movie about a man having a mid-life crisis, it's understandable. Is it overwrought and self-indulgent? It has that potential for viewers who don't connect with the style or the characters, but for me it was too honest and well made to brush off. I got sucked in and was mesmerized by the swirling, teetering effects that never let you get confused or out of control.

Old-fashioned melodrama longing to be flashy and modern. Director Elia Kazan, adapting his own bestseller, has assembled a terrific cast in story of a 44-year-old married advertising executive with a mistress who attempts suicide. Cold and detached, the film wants us to sympathize with a lot of people we might normally recoil from: the rich and privileged who live in a well-heeled vacuum. As Kirk Douglas' other woman, Faye Dunaway, who was featured in a slew of pictures from 1967-1969, was perilously at risk of being overexposed. She's gorgeously coiffed and manicured here, but her impassive face and personality don't involve the audience--and all of Douglas' striding up and down over her seems like a wasting disease. Kazan wants us to see the unsavory nature of these people, the office sharks and their suffering wives at the mercy of their whims, but the bitter 'truth' behind his portrait is heightened--just as it was in pictures like "Peyton Place"--and after a while it all begins to seem like a rancid put-on. ** from ****