Martin Ritt’s 1957 film No Down Payment opens overlooking a Los Angeles freeway, traffic blurring in every direction as the credit sequence moves along the various roadways, discernibly inching away from the city-center, though the crush of vehicles––and thus, people––never dwindles. The crowd, as John Sims experienced it as early as 1928 in King Vidor’s The Crowd, sustains itself, perpetuates itself all the way out to the suburbs, where closeness is encouraged by the mass-produced subdivision, a catch-all “solution” to the population boom of America’s postwar years, where families grew in tandem with soldiers returning. These unremarkable tract houses, replete with the same paltry amenities (one-story and a living room that perfectly accommodates a television set), exuded a stifling uniformity across the country, from the Levittowns of the East Coast to the Sunrise Hills of No Down Payment; but, they also allowed quick move-ins and, as the title of Ritt’s film indicates, didn’t require a deposit.
The cheapness of a fictional subdivision like Sunrise Hills can be worked out with a closeness/cost ratio, technically set apart houses that still lead into one another, the few feet of backyard space easily invadable by neighbors on all sides. As more money circulates, the further the plots move away from one another, the more chosen the company becomes, with the same sort of cloistering “self-sufficiency” that guarantees that everyone still knows one another. It just may be a bit more of a distance to travel from party to party, like the boozed-up, upper class townsfolk of Henry Hathaway’s The Bottom of the Bottle, which mostly plays out within a Arizona-Mexico border hamlet of one-story ranches, outfitted with alternating wall-to-wall carpet and slippery tile, billiards tables, firearms displays and tacky facsimiles of desert sunsets stretching over the in-home bar. And when the rainy season comes and the river violently rises so that it’s impossible to safely cross, this set of ranch homes becomes even more sequestered, so the parties continue longer, the alcohol consumption increases, the rabble an afterthought on the other side of the river––Ruth Roman’s character is introduced explaining these storm-induced alcoholic blitzkriegs, her home with Joseph Cotten the first of what’s presumably many stops until the river recedes.
Between these poles of infinitely-spanning cul-de-sacs of anonymous architecture and haphazard desert decadence sits Richard Quine’s Strangers When We Meet, whose Los Angeles suburb (shooting locations are a cross-section of affluent neighborhoods: Bel Air, Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Malibu) isn’t as explicitly acknowledged as the stultifying entity it is when compared to No Down Payment or The Bottom of the Bottle, though there’s still the identifiable connecting elements. Intrusiveness reigns, parties are pressure-cookers, neighbors act on entitlement afforded by their self-enclosed surroundings. The latent, lustful––and destructive––desire for adultery of No Down Payment springs forth more “tastefully” in Strangers When We Meet, it being what brings Kim Novak and Kirk Douglas into their melancholic, infidelitous union, but it still devolves into a suffocating ennui, with a despairing action capping it all off. Enacted within yet another suburban tract house, the presiding impersonality of this rupturing event gives a slap of superciliousness, courtesy of the offending third party.
The American suburb had always been integral to Hollywood’s pet narratives, equally capable of evoking the winding roads of family manors of the early 20th century (Meet Me in St. Louis) as it was looming as an establishment to take immediate possible flight from (Beyond the Forest), or more generally avalanching its inhabitants in decorum, tradition, intrusiveness, and other social strictures (Hail the Conquering Hero, All That Heaven Allows, Home From the Hill). However, as more “grown-up” bloat began to swell in late ‘50s and early ‘60s, the suburbs mutated into something of a fetish object, vectors for adult concerns to be didactically presented and all too easily dismantled. This pernicious prestige was occasionally well handled by directors with top heavy casts and unwieldy CinemaScope, like in Arthur Penn’s The Chase––it also succeeded when sublimated in the leanness of genre cinema, like Richard Fleischer’s Violent Saturday. But for every one of those films, there’s the stodgy territory of Stanley Kramer or the relentless histrionics of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, where caricature reigns in humorless scenarios, and place is a mere byproduct of drama, rather than the rightful inverse.
Place can be elucidated by a paradoxical lack of remarkable detail, which is what makes No Down Payment’s Sunrise Hills a fascinating labyrinth of sameness, its residential sprawl interrupted only by its church and the modest downtown strip, as David and Jean Martin (Jeffery Hunter and Patricia Owen, respectively) smilingly recognize on their drive in. Twin totems of religion and commerce, with the denizens housed––packed––in the middle. Ritt once said, “I think form in film is exaggerated. I don’t want anything to interfere with the story,” and Sunrise Hills adheres wonderfully to the director’s actors-first asceticism, the onscreen austerity compounding the preexisting rifts of class, gender and race. The camera pulls back within the Martin’s empty house upon their arrival, giving the negative space scope, before cutting to their neighbors across the backyard, Herman and Betty Kreitzer (Pat Hingle and Barbara Rush, respectively), whose unobscured view already implies the coming invasiveness, as well as stamps these homes with the brand of monotony: even in its unadorned state, the Martins’ place looks just the same as the Kreitzers’. The tangled knot of issues fomented––from racism to assault to addiction––manifest themselves in variegated permutations across Sunrise Hills, these different combinations of players and problems granted a non-changing stage, a neutral battleground, even.
The stagebound qualities are pervasive––and hint at Ritt’s past as an independent theater director––though that’s par for the course for this roundelay tour of these four homes (rounded out by Tony Randall and Sheree North’s Jerry and Isabelle Flagg, and Joanne Woodward and Cameron Mitchell’s Leola and Troy Boone), with group scenes providing plenty of lingering malaise and confusion to then be discussed in later two-shot confrontations. Ritt cannily consolidates his various strands within Joseph LaShelle’s deep CinemaScope frames, which utilize duration to demonstrate standard procedure: Troy and Leola’s seemingly bottomless appetite for one and another, which actually swings back and forth between sex and totally burnt out, unremitting arguments; Jerry’s alcoholism, a predilection that entails benders and long nights out, so that when he comes squealing back into the driveway, Isabelle plugs in the electric coffeemaker––and if he walks by her straight to the bedroom, she makes sure to unplug it before following him.
A community prone to small pockets of internal combustions will inevitably have to explode outwards, and blacklisted Ben Maddow’s script springboards clumsily from variable to variable––Troy wants to be Sunrise Hills’ police chief but doesn’t have the required college degree, David would make more money if he transferred himself over from engineering to sales, Jerry doesn’t have any money at all, Leola wants a family that’s denied her––though the lasting, souring impression is of an organism that balances itself out, expelling dangerous and nonconforming elements, for better and for worse. The next day, following a horrifying nighttime sequence in which Troy breaks into the Martins’ knowing that David is away, and rapes Jean, the two men fight, following which, in a freak accident, Troy’s car which he tunes and repairs in his free time, falls on him, crushing his chest with the wheelwell. Now, with the absence of the racist Troy, who had a shrine in his garage dedicated to his bloody conquests in Guadalcanal, Herman’s indispensable Japanese coworker, Ito (Aki Aleong), can rightfully move into Sunrise Hills with his family. However, the film ends with Leola leaving in a taxi, presumably for good, with none of the other characters bidding her good luck, much less goodbye: now with neither a husband nor child, there’s no place for her within the postwar family boom, the myth of accommodation totally detonated by No Down Payment’s close, though it’s willfully ignored by her once neighbors.
The crux of the The Bottom of the Bottle is one who’s saddled with this ostracizing personal defect, as is deemed by those around them. Donald Martin (Van Johnson) shows up unexpectedly on the doorstep of his estranged brother, P.M. (Cotten), after breaking out of prison, and his brother’s ranch is the perfect checkpoint before he’s finally able to reunite with his wife and kids who are waiting for him in Mexico––Donald, who P.M. practically disowned when he absconded from their small midwestern town, is also a recovering alcoholic, and was serving a sentence for killing a man while inebriated, which his older brother took as reason to sever ties with him all over again. So ashamed is P.M. of Donald, that he passes him off as an old friend who’s come for an impromptu visit.
Because Donald has crashed during the height of the rainy season, he’s also unwillingly ensnared in the complacent, boozy bourgeois customs of such seclusion the impassable river has proffered. When P.M. tries to confidentially hint at why his “friend” may not be stepping into a healthy environment to neighbor Ellen Miller (Peggy Knudsen), she replies with a queasy exclamation of titillation, doubling down on her invitation, just so they all have someone––who they’ll treat like something––to gawk at. P.M. wants to maintain as much of a distance as possible between the liquor and his brother; everyone else wants to ply Donald with drinks to see a recovering alcoholic unravel in real time.
Hathaway himself had something of a penchant for outsiders, though he was more fascinated by their thresholds of breaking down rather than their symbolic position in a dismissive society, and Donald is not unlike Gary Cooper’s eponymous orphaned Peter Ibbetson or George Raft’s monomaniacal Tyler Dawson in Spawn of the North. By introducing destabilization into his remarkably stately direction, the director was able to arrive at metaphor, allegory, et al. through the back door, the foregrounding of visceral experience doing the work of a more heavy-handed script, which many of his films were manacled to regardless.
Similar to 1953’s Niagara––which modestly alters the courses of these suburban fault-lines to fit within the temporary routines of its hotel setting––The Bottom of the Bottle builds upon the possibilities of surface pleasures, color and framing specifically, Lee Garmes’ CinemaScope work replicating the suburban spread of these ranches within the homes themselves, shadows engulfing the totally empty stretches between the more functional spaces, like the bedroom, the kitchen, the bar (Kent Jones aptly summarized the film’s visual palette as one that makes “as formidable an impression as Joseph Cotten’s neurotic local big shot”). There are plenty of accouterments, especially in Jack Carson’s home, where he’s often followed by a halo of antique firearms pinned to his wall, but the reigning nondescriptness seems to encourage physical and emotional brawling. When P.M. and Donald fight, they slip and slide across the infinite tiles of the former’s home; later, when P.M. ruefully looks out his window, wondering where his once again absent brother is, Cotten and Roman are positioned so that they are the only points of visible significance, despite a perfect view past the billowing curtains into their sterile living room. When Donald and P.M. eventually reconcile, it’s out of doors: Hathaway frequently shoots the two from a distance, esconsing them in the natural world. This reunion is perhaps too perfunctory, too neat for a film so otherwise lovably disheveled, but the liberating setting, where broken bonds are healed and new ones formed, is like Vidor’s occasionally ecstatic, occasionally tragic Back to the Land trilogy (as termed by Raymond Durgnat), as refracted through the mores of an inarguably postwar America.
Decamping from the repressed cul-de-sacs to achieve an intimate rapport with another person in the unpopulated swaths of Los Angeles countryside is what powers Strangers When We Meet, where passing interactions bloom in the perfect isolation of the outdoors. Ambitious though blocked-up architect Larry Coe (Douglas) takes on the task of designing a modern and unconventional house for burgeoning author Roger Alter (a lovably “enlightened”––as by the standards of the early 1960s––Ernie Kovacks), tucked away in a plot of hills. By chance, Larry invites his neighbor Maggie (Novak) to one of his initial surveying trips, as their polite, harmless conversations at the schoolbus stop––another suburbia hallmark––reveal a mutual interest in contemporary homebuilding. At this one moment where they pull his tape measure along Roger’s prospective hilltop, their collective and projected architectural fantasy plays not unlike the spartan work of Straub-Huillet, where unimpeachable nature is nevertheless imagined as a conduit for performance that draws on non-present building-blocks like, as in Strangers When We Meet, a palatial home.
Larry and Maggie can’t abandon their respective lives and run off into those enticing hills, entrenched are they in respective responsibility that coincidentally skips over their own sexual and emotional fulfillment. Both have partners committed to convention, where husbands must strive forward professionally and wives must accept both every advance and rejection, like near the beginning when Maggie’s husband romantically rebuffs her, and she’s left practically adrift in her hallway, the terrifyingly large CinemaScope frame rendering this functional space an entirely alienating and transient one. Like that earlier masterpiece of Quine’s, the despondent noir Drive a Crooked Road, the characters can only make it as far as the beach before the internally invented future crumbles. The messy confluence of desire, repression and overall tension within Larry breaks through when, at their favorite Malibu beachside restaurant, Maggie is confronted by a onetime lover, who Larry promptly tackles out of the way, but not before the intruder can succinctly deflate the delusion at the root of their relationship: “you’re not her husband mister, so back off.” They get as close as they can to the sky and the ocean, but at that moment, in a dexterous long take courtesy of Charles Lang, the two leave the restaurant and drag themselves back to the reality of their social and familial positions.
In fact, the more Larry and Maggie participate in the necessary customs of suburbia, the more their affair stalls, and the thrill of escape calcifies. Douglas’ performance becomes more irritable and closed-off, whilst Novak disappears further into the almost shell-shocked candor she was introduced with. Even the house, the more it comes together and begins to resemble their homes down the hill, signifies the end of their dalliance, the practicalities of room dimensions and windowpanes and staircases and so on standing in for the necessary and taboo formalities of divorce and relocation that both would have to undertake (in a real life imitates art event, Quine, being in a very public relationship with Novak at the time, was to be gifted the house by the studio following the wrap and their imminent wedding, but the actress backed out). As Larry’s leering neighbor––in a performance that plays like the evil inverse of his more affable coworker in Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life––Walter Matthau fulfills a similar function to Cameron Mitchell in No Down Payment, a harbinger of violence that gets at the male-prioritization of a community where every one is heterosexually partnered off. Larry will eventually leave, family in tow, to pursue work in Hawaii, effectively receiving the move from the suburbs he so visibly pined for, while retaining the safety net of marriage and work. Maggie, however, is marooned within the oneiric Mobius Strip of manicured lawns and two-story homes that had benumbed them both.
Within something of a wilderness period for Hollywood, the once immovable studio system protractedly bottoming out, these three films were wrongly categorized with the other detritus of the period, tagged with “melodrama”––in the derogatory sense of the word: Variety labeled Strangers When We Meet an “old fashioned soap opera”––criticized for their diaphanous visuals, their unwavering interrogation of a postwar residential utopia perhaps too difficult to grasp if participating in such a collective illusion. Ritt performed one of the more impressive acts of subterfuge, this far-left director extracting a resolutely anti-capitalist film from John McPartland’s deadly straightforward novel; among other things, the author was responsible for the virulently anticommunist and unashamedly fear mongering 1948 Life article, “The Life of An American Communist”. So, a script by Maddow––whose blacklist front, like on Johnny Guitar three years prior, was Philip Yordan––who had artistic roots in early leftist documentary filmmaking, runs contrary to McPartland’s overarching, abhorrent purview. Generally, these are films that stow away thematic import in their aesthetic corners, which wait patiently for a discerning viewer to unveil.
No Down Payment may be the only film of the three to reference the war by name, but the Eisenhower years are the outward rings of a rippling wartime center, of which can be traced through The Bottom of the Bottle and Strangers When We Meet as well. All these alcohol soaked parties in these dolorously American settings––which really play as unfalteringly unpleasant more than actually fun––are halfhearted affirmations of a bourgeois, or bourgeois-aspiring, survival.