The opening scene of David Lynch's "Blue Velvet" gives us generous shots of a happy small town, the friendly firemen waving from their truck, the tulips blooming in glossy color, and then the camera slowly focuses in on a grassy lawn, and then underneath the grass, revealing a horde of buzzing and repulsive beetles and ants. "No Down Payment" takes that concise metaphor and expands it to feature length.
Hunter and Owens are a married couple who move into a ranch-style house on a bland street in a blank California housing development called Sage Mews or Elysian Fields or whatever it is. The neighbors are right affable though. Let's see. There Pat Hingle, manager of a modest department store, and wife Barbara Rush. He's a right-enough guy who plays it safe. (He's on the City Council.) Then there are Tony Randall and wife Sheree North. Randall, it's quickly shown, has a problem. He loves his family but he's an overly ambitious used car salesman filled with wild dreams about The Big Break that will make him a millionaire. Really. Meanwhile, to ease his torment, he drinks like a fish and makes a fool of himself.
Then there are ex Marine Cameron Mitchell and wife Joanne Woodward who describes herself correctly as "a good-natured slob." She's sort of happy-go-lucky and is a hillbilly from Tennessee, like her husband. But if she's loosey goosey, Mitchell is twisted into a pretzel by his anger and paranoia. The uneducated Mitchell longs for the glory days when he crawled through the mud of Guadalcanal and Luzon and holds in contempt Jeffrey Hunter, who spent the war as an electrical engineer at Los Alamos.
Mountain View or Pinyon Pointe may seem like a happy place but it's pustular with problems. It all leads to several acts of violence. I don't know if I'd want to live there. It's a Paradise in which the rules are pretty strict. No washing you car in your driveway on Sundays when you should be in church. (Everybody, and I mean everybody, attends the same church.) Get a little tipsy at a party and someone will suggest with a casual smile that maybe you should switch to coffee. No Japs allowed, even if they served in the infantry. At a casual backyard barbecue, the men wear suits and ties, and the women wear cocktail dresses.
This was the end of the 1950s, when it was perfectly reasonable to want to move to a peaceful smog-free bedroom suburb if you could afford it. Everybody wanted to do it and many did. Yet it was on the cusp of -- and partly the cause of -- an enormous change in the nature of our society.
The middle-class white moved to the Gardens of Babylon housing development, taking their taxes with them, and left the cities to become what they became ten years later. And there is a perfect absence of feminine independence. The wives are there to run the home, raise the children, have dinner ready, and support their husbands. Not a word about a wife getting a job, even when additional income is desperately needed. All this turns the movie into an historical curiosity, like an episode of "The Honeymooners" expanded and transported to Chestnut Valley Homes.
Martin Ritt, the director, has done some splendid work with small ensemble casts -- "Hud," "Norma Rae," "Hombre" -- but this was only his second feature film and there wasn't much he could do with a script so schematic and uneven. By "uneven" I mean that some of the characters change radically with no reasons given. Barbara Rush turns from a pragmatist who wants to keep the Japanese out until the end when she reverses her position. Mitchell turns from a stern but helpful neighbor into a drunken rapist. How does a man who is drunk rape anyone? Pat Hingle, City Council member, changes from a play-it-safe fellow to an activist who presumably gets his Japanese employee a place in the sun, without any tedious exposition.
All the ladies have an opportunity break down into a cascade of agonized sobs, at least once. Joanne Woodward does it most convincingly. Patricia Owens, even with her beauty and her anthracite irises, isn't believable. Cameron Mitchell had only a few good roles, two of them, including this one and the washed-out sheriff in "Hombre" among his best. He could act, given a chance to play something other than a schmuck or an outright villain.
See it by all means, if you're interested at all in the social and economic history of America.
Hunter and Owens are a married couple who move into a ranch-style house on a bland street in a blank California housing development called Sage Mews or Elysian Fields or whatever it is. The neighbors are right affable though. Let's see. There Pat Hingle, manager of a modest department store, and wife Barbara Rush. He's a right-enough guy who plays it safe. (He's on the City Council.) Then there are Tony Randall and wife Sheree North. Randall, it's quickly shown, has a problem. He loves his family but he's an overly ambitious used car salesman filled with wild dreams about The Big Break that will make him a millionaire. Really. Meanwhile, to ease his torment, he drinks like a fish and makes a fool of himself.
Then there are ex Marine Cameron Mitchell and wife Joanne Woodward who describes herself correctly as "a good-natured slob." She's sort of happy-go-lucky and is a hillbilly from Tennessee, like her husband. But if she's loosey goosey, Mitchell is twisted into a pretzel by his anger and paranoia. The uneducated Mitchell longs for the glory days when he crawled through the mud of Guadalcanal and Luzon and holds in contempt Jeffrey Hunter, who spent the war as an electrical engineer at Los Alamos.
Mountain View or Pinyon Pointe may seem like a happy place but it's pustular with problems. It all leads to several acts of violence. I don't know if I'd want to live there. It's a Paradise in which the rules are pretty strict. No washing you car in your driveway on Sundays when you should be in church. (Everybody, and I mean everybody, attends the same church.) Get a little tipsy at a party and someone will suggest with a casual smile that maybe you should switch to coffee. No Japs allowed, even if they served in the infantry. At a casual backyard barbecue, the men wear suits and ties, and the women wear cocktail dresses.
This was the end of the 1950s, when it was perfectly reasonable to want to move to a peaceful smog-free bedroom suburb if you could afford it. Everybody wanted to do it and many did. Yet it was on the cusp of -- and partly the cause of -- an enormous change in the nature of our society.
The middle-class white moved to the Gardens of Babylon housing development, taking their taxes with them, and left the cities to become what they became ten years later. And there is a perfect absence of feminine independence. The wives are there to run the home, raise the children, have dinner ready, and support their husbands. Not a word about a wife getting a job, even when additional income is desperately needed. All this turns the movie into an historical curiosity, like an episode of "The Honeymooners" expanded and transported to Chestnut Valley Homes.
Martin Ritt, the director, has done some splendid work with small ensemble casts -- "Hud," "Norma Rae," "Hombre" -- but this was only his second feature film and there wasn't much he could do with a script so schematic and uneven. By "uneven" I mean that some of the characters change radically with no reasons given. Barbara Rush turns from a pragmatist who wants to keep the Japanese out until the end when she reverses her position. Mitchell turns from a stern but helpful neighbor into a drunken rapist. How does a man who is drunk rape anyone? Pat Hingle, City Council member, changes from a play-it-safe fellow to an activist who presumably gets his Japanese employee a place in the sun, without any tedious exposition.
All the ladies have an opportunity break down into a cascade of agonized sobs, at least once. Joanne Woodward does it most convincingly. Patricia Owens, even with her beauty and her anthracite irises, isn't believable. Cameron Mitchell had only a few good roles, two of them, including this one and the washed-out sheriff in "Hombre" among his best. He could act, given a chance to play something other than a schmuck or an outright villain.
See it by all means, if you're interested at all in the social and economic history of America.