THE FILM
FILM DIRECTOR: Elia Kazan
SCREENWRITER: Elia Kazan
FILM STARS: Kirk Douglas, Faye Dunaway, Deborah Kerr, Richard Boone, Hume Cronyn, Harold Gould, Michael Murphy, John Randolph Jones, Charles Drake, Barry Sullivan
COUNTRY: USA
THIS BOOK
AUTHOR: Elia Kazan
TYPE: Novel
PUBLISHER: Sphere
THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 1969
COUNTRY: Great Britain
COVER: Paperback
THE ORIGINAL BOOK
ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above
YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1967
ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: The film title
NOTES
GENRE: Drama
WORDS: I saw this a couple of times a long time ago and recall loving it. Why, I don’t know. By that I do not mean it’s not good but apart from the general disillusionment of the central character I’m not sure why I would relate as I was in my early 20s. Maybe it was because Kirk Douglas was playing a variation on a Kirk Douglas role … the flawed hero. Something I liked and something we could do with now in the age of characters who triumph over all. Or maybe it was Faye Dunaway circa 1969. What’s not to like? Kerr and Boone offer good major supports. The rest of the cast, likewise, is strong. I watched everything by director Kazan (more than once) and here he directs from a screenplay written by him base on a book he wrote. Yep, love him or not, he was an auteur.
It seems to me now, and the film is still vivid in my rose coloured glasses mind, that I could not have appreciated the film for the right reasons being that the film is about middle age disillusionment. Disillusionment with oneself, one’s job, one’s life, one’s marriage …. the arrangement you have made to survive successfully. My life now? I have to watch the film again to see what I make of it now.
This Kazan book I have not read, but I should as I’m about the same age as the protagonist … or maybe I shouldn’t for fear it may jolt me out of my arrangement as the back cover suggests. The book was a best seller. And a recommendation from Henry Miller no less.
The film did well. Interestingly, given our (recent) times, production was shut down twice, with Douglas catching Hong Kong Flu three times.
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