Movie Review: No Down Payment (1957)

A suburban drama exploring the dissatisfaction churning beneath the pursuit of the American dream, No Down Payment is packed with characters and sub-plots. The chasms between ambition and reality create compelling storylines, but are also frequently over-torqued.

In California, electrical engineer David Martin (Jeffrey Hunter) and his wife Jean (Patricia Owens) move into the Los Angeles suburb of Sunrise Hills. They quickly befriend their neighbours, all similarly aged middle class couples: decorated war veteran Troy Boone (Cameron Mitchell) and his wife Leola (Joanne Woodward); used car salesman Jerry Flagg (Tony Randall) and his wife Isabelle (Sheree North); and store manager Herman Kreitzer (Pat Hingle) and his wife Betty (Barbara Rush).

Through backyard barbecues and community interactions, David and Jean are quickly embroiled in their new neighbours' personal dramas. Troy has limited formal education and desperately wants to become Sunrise Hills' police chief. He is also attracted to sophisticated newcomer Jean, who enjoys flirting, much to David's chagrin. Meanwhile Jerry dreams of becoming wealthy, but the reality of his car salesman job drives him to excessive drinking. Herm and Betty are the most stable couple, although she is a church-goer and he isn't, while his position on the Sunrise Hills council forces him to confront the community's racism. With the four couples' various struggles reaching a boiling point, dangerous emotions erupt into the open.

An exposé of the anxieties and frustrations hiding behind picket fences in the suburban communities sprouting after World War Two, No Down Payment boldly seeks dark corners of discontent. With a lot of ground to cover, Philip Yordan's script gets down to business quickly, introducing eight adults in the first 20 minutes, and director Martin Ritt trusts his cast to embrace the individual differentiators required to create the same-but-different dynamic.

While the couples are similarly aged, white, and reasonably privileged, their contrasts are sharply drawn. David is a cerebral engineer, avoiding a more lucrative career in sales but at the risk of disappointing the ambitious Jean. Troy is an ex-Marine, his psyche forged (and damaged) during intense combat against the Japanese. Jerry's dreams are much broader than his limited talent. Herm is closest to matching expectations with status, and is awakening to the racist boundary lines drawn around parcels of opportunity.

In an ensemble cast lacking obvious star power, Tony Randall, Cameron Mitchell, Jeffrey Hunter and Pat Hingle deliver surprisingly effective performances, well beyond their career personas. The women are all assigned analogous roles as housekeepers with the primary mission of looking after their husbands and children. Leola enjoys the darkest backstory, Joanne Woodward provided the opportunity to shine as her character travels along the bumpiest suburban roads carrying painful luggage.

Filmed in back and white and CinemaScope, the paradoxical setting helps to colour the context. All the homes in Sunrise Hills look alike, and are packed close enough together to eradicate privacy. This is the starter kit for the American dream, affordable home ownership without individuality or seclusion. The residents cannot avoid the grass colour on the other side of the fence, and the status of the Joneses is visible through the bedroom window.

Despite the film's ambition to tackle serious subject matter, several resolutions are half-hearted or lack conviction. The racism sub-plot is left hanging, and several characters undergo incongruous and rapid transformations. Yordan and Ritt eventually meander towards a series of shouting matches and miserable relationship breakdowns, before an assault comprehensively shreds the veneer of suburban utopia. No Down Payment promises the illusion of here-and-now material wealth, but as four couples find out, short-term gain usually also means long-term pain.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.

Movie Review: The Searchers (1956)

A visually spectacular and contextually challenging western, The Searchers is a grim saga of a years-long search for a white girl abducted by Comanche natives. It is also a journey through the lost soul of the man obsessed with finding her for all the wrong reasons.

Three years after the end of the Civil War, confederate soldier Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) unexpectedly returns to the secluded Texas home of his brother Aaron (Walter Coy) and his family: wife Martha (Dorothy Jordan), daughters Debbie and Lucy, and son Ben. But soon after arriving, Ethan leaves again to join a posse organized by the Reverend Captain Samuel Johnson Clayton (Ward Bond) to chase after tribal cattle rustlers. It’s a ruse. With the posse away, the natives attack the household, killing Aaron, Martha and Ben, and abducting daughters Debbie and Lucy.

Ethan commits to finding the girls. He is joined by Lucy’s fiancé Brad Jorgensen (Harry Carey, Jr.) and Debbie’s adopted brother Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter). Lucy is soon found dead, and Brad is blinded by rage and dies in a suicidal one-man assault. With Debbie still missing, the trail runs cold. Ethan and Martin will be searching for years, putting a strain on Martin’s relationship with sweetheart Laurie (Vera Miles), while Debbie (Natalie Wood) grows up as part of the Comanche tribe of Chief Scar (Henry Brandon).

One of the most commanding collaborations between director John Ford and star John Wayne, The Searchers is an inflection point in the history of the genre. The film introduces a central character of dubious moral standing and compromised ethics, the type of man much more likely to have tamed the west compared to the scrubbed white hat of the genre's mythology. Ethan Edwards is an unsavoury "hero" with a murky and less than stellar past. He drifts in and out of the lives of his family members with nary a thought for their feelings, and is either hostile or condescending to friend and foe alike.

Prone to extreme violence and harbouring deep-seated racist attitudes, his quest is not so much a rescue mission as an opportunity for revenge, and Ethan does not hide his motives. Most relaxed when he is inflicting maximum damage, he kills buffalo out of spite, continues to shoot at a group of natives in full retreat, and desecrates a dead corpse just to torture his soul.

The Searchers finally finds the darkest corner of Ethan's psyche when it becomes clear he may actually just rather destroy Debbie, his mind twisting the endless search into a mercy killing mission. To him, she has become one of them, and "living with the Comanche ain't living." Blinded by his racism, Ethan may believe the best way to rescue Debbie is to violently release her from the only adult world she has known.

And yet Ethan possesses the heroic attributes of courage, doggedness and willingness to act. And to add to the shifting psychological sands Ethan's motives may be a lot more personal than anyone is willing to discuss. There is an undercurrent of eerily silent tension between Ethan, Aaron and Martha, and the soft gestures and unspoken words between Ethan and Martha suggest intriguing possibilities about who exactly is Debbie's father.

In a courageous performance signalling the end of nostalgic idealism towards the era's manhood, Wayne plays Ethan with an honesty towards the material as a hunter and killer tolerated for resourceful toughness but little else.

Ford filmed The Searchers in Monument Valley, and the VistaVision colour cinematography by Winton C. Hoch is wondrous, with almost every frame a landscape masterpiece. With the rock formations and wide open vistas serving as a backdrop, Ford plays with silhouettes, framing and juxtaposes the small human scale with the magnificence of imposing terrain.

Stunning in its style, depth, and audacious willingness to seek new territory, The Searchers carves new horizons out of a bedrock of legend.

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.