The Arrangement

Having been absent from the screen since America, America (1963), Kazan returned with this glossy account of middle-age crack-up based on his own glossy, Harold Robbins-ish novel. Douglas plays an advertising executive who suddenly clues into the emptiness of his existence and drives serenely under a truck - there after driving his family up the wall as he follows his failed suicide attempt with the kind of high jinks that had earlier served Britain's Angry Young Men in cocking a snook at society. It all seems very forced in Kazan's case, where it isn't simply glib and indulgent (as in Douglas' sybaritic fling with Dunaway's liberated lady ad exec).