John Frankenheimer (1962)

This adaptation by William Inge of James Leo Herlihy’s 1960 novel begins with a shot of a Greyhound bus on which sixteen-year-old Clinton Willarts is travelling.  His voice on the soundtrack tells us, excitedly, that he’s en route to meet his big brother Berry-Berry (this peculiar name is never explained).  All Fall Down is the story of how Clinton comes of age.   He embraces life (whereas Berry-Berry, as he says explicitly at one point, hates it), stops hero-worshipping his glamorously feckless brother, and begins to see his unhappy parents, Ralph and Annabel (the two sons call them by their first names), in a different light.  Clinton’s bus journey at the start is taking him from his home in Cleveland, Ohio to the Florida Keys.  He has two hundred dollars in his pocket – the money Berry-Berry needs to set up a shrimp boat business.  When Clinton arrives in Florida, he discovers that Berry-Berry is in jail, for assaulting a prostitute.  The prison officer tells Clinton that two hundred dollars was the amount set for his brother’s bail and decides to release Berry-Berry in exchange for the cash.    Penniless, the two brothers start walking back in the direction from which the Greyhound bus came.

They eventually hitch a lift with two young women who like the look of Berry-Berry; in a hotel bar somewhere else in Florida a sex-starved middle-aged woman takes a shine to him too.  She supplies the money needed for Clinton’s fare back to Cleveland and Berry-Berry disappears with her.  Clinton grins happily when he first sees his brother and he says, ‘Gee, I’ll miss you, Berry-Berry’ (he appends the name to almost every sentence he speaks) when they go their separate ways.  Beyond that, we don’t get much sense of what the rapid succession of events in Florida mean to him – even though it must be an extraordinary experience for a schoolboy who seems not to have been away from home before.  Once he’s back in Cleveland, we learn that Clinton spends much of his time filling notebooks with the conversations he overhears, including those of his parents.   Annabel thinks this is unnatural behaviour even if Clinton is, as she says, ‘some kind of genius’. (I don’t know to what extent All Fall Down is autobiographical but Clinton’s transcription mania tends to suggest the character in the story will grow up to be the writer who created that character.)  But, as played by Brandon deWilde, the boy is so affably innocent and – without a voiceover to help him – reacts so weakly to the ensuing melodrama that he seems more simple-minded than perceptive.

Brandon deWilde cuts an unfortunate figure in All Fall Down in more ways than one.   In retrospect, it’s very sad to hear Clinton’s affirmation that he loves life spoken by an actor who died young (and in a motor accident – which is what triggers the climax to this film).   DeWilde is also unprepossessing as a presence and as an actor.   That’s not the way of all child stars grown up but it’s certainly what happened in this case.  As a seven-year-old in 1950, deWilde came to prominence in the original Broadway production of The Member of the Wedding;  he appeared in Fred Zinnemann’s film version in 1952 and, the following year, enjoyed his greatest success as the child in Shane.   A decade later, deWilde had filled out without growing tall; as Clinton, he’s broad in the beam.  He doesn’t have the same bulkiness a year later in Hud.  Otherwise, what I put in my note of that film anticipates almost exactly the impression deWilde makes in All Fall Down:

‘… there’s a sadness about his presence here, because of that association [with Shane], because the actor was dead in 1972 at the age of 30 – and, though it seems unkind to say so, because of the gulf between deWilde’s interpretative skills and those of the other three principals.’

In All Fall Down there are four other principals:  Karl Malden (Ralph), Angela Lansbury (Annabel), Warren Beatty (Berry-Berry) and Eva Marie Saint, as Echo, the daughter of an old friend of Annabel, who’s a house guest with the Willarts and who detains Berry-Berry there when he eventually returns to Cleveland.  Although physically right for the role, Beatty isn’t at his best here.  In the scenes in which Berry-Berry gives sexually indigent women what they want – the woman in the Florida bar (Constance Ford), a schoolteacher (Barbara Baxley) who drives into the garage where he’s working at the time – Beatty’s good at getting across the character’s seductive expertise and the mixture of self-satisfaction and self-disgust that produces in him.   He’s less persuasive when Berry-Berry’s in a ‘serious’ relationship with Echo and he can’t bring to life the young man’s physically abusive side (the teacher also is on the receiving end of this when things turn sour), which should be shocking.  When the camera closes in for what are meant to be moments of truth in the later stages, Beatty is strained and inexpressive.

In spite of these weaknesses his magnetism is crucial in delivering the strongest element of All Fall Down – the inadvertently man-eating propensities of Annabel Willart and, in particular, her relationship with her elder son.   This Freudian mother is a dramatic cliché – as is her exhausting chatterbox behaviour – but the explicitness of Annabel’s passion for Berry-Berry is startling and affecting.   John Frankenheimer certainly knew how to get the best out of Angela Lansbury.  As Annabel, she’s not as consistently brilliant as she was in The Manchurian Candidate later in the same year but she’s physically daring and emotionally fearless:  when Berry-Berry comes home and Annabel gazes at and moves towards him as if he were a returning lover; when she frankly describes to her husband her envious resentment of Echo (whom Annabel likes very much) once she and Berry-Berry have fallen in love; when she leaps from her chair and onto the floor to rescue the framed photograph of Berry-Berry that Clinton tries to destroy.  Thanks to Lansbury’s histrionic power, Beatty seems more at ease in his scenes with her, where his disengagement from the role fuses satisfyingly with Berry-Berry’s taking care to shut himself from his mother.   There’s a connection too between Lansbury’s natural acting style and the character she’s playing.  She’s an emphatic performer, even in small details.  This gives an extra edge to Annabel’s unfailing tendency to push too hard and, as a result, suffocate the men in the family.  Annabel isn’t meant to be the main character but Angela Lansbury is the central dynamic of All Fall Down – she’s both the centre of attention and helps to enhance what her co-stars do.

The only way that Annabel can keep Berry-Berry under the same roof as her is through his being attracted to another woman on the premises – the effectiveness of this irony obscures the very basic plotting which gets Echo into the house at the right time.   (This is the kind of engineering that works better in a stage play with a single set, which temporarily becomes the whole world.)  Just as Annabel causes her sons – and her husband – to back off, so Echo draws all three men to her.  Eva Marie Saint is able, through her more delicate presence and less forceful acting, to complement Angela Lansbury’s performance and to make this obvious idea plausible.   Saint too is playing a stock character – a beauty who is mysteriously alone and who has an unhappy love affair to explain her solitude – but her elegance makes Echo’s idiosyncrasies charming.  (She not only drives a handsome car but knows how to fix the engine when it breaks down.  The ironic pattern of the writing dictates of course that this lover of motors dies in one.)     Ralph Willart is a crudely eccentric character, a practising socialist who’s retired from a career in real estate to drink himself to death and fail to complete jigsaws.  Karl Malden is probably miscast in the role but he’s such a strong and truthful actor that he makes it work – you believe that Ralph’s effortful humour is a way of maintaining an identity in the household.  There’s a touching moment when Annabel tells Ralph she’s always admired his ability to cope in a crisis; he says nothing but we feel his surprised gratitude.

According to Wikipedia, William Inge became known as ‘the Playwright of the Midwest’ but he displays an appetite for sexual melodrama that seems to belong further south.   John Frankenheimer may be uncomfortable in Florida:  the floozies in a bar on the Florida Keys, the bar owner/bouncer (Madame Spivy) who throws Clinton out in a pointlessly energetic fashion, the prison officers – all these cameos are badly overdrawn.   Back in Cleveland, too much screen time is spent on the night before Christmas (cross-cutting to Berry-Berry’s antics in Louisville, Kentucky, where he’s gone with the hapless teacher).  Although Angela Lansbury is very fine in the scene with Clinton by the family Christmas tree, the following sequence, in which Ralph invites three tramps into the house, goes on way too long and seems to belong in a different movie.   All Fall Down is infused with the same drive to present the American family as garishly dysfunctional that impelled Inge’s screenplay for Splendor in the Grass but which is merged here with a getting-of- manhood structure that’s both more affirmative and more generic – and which makes Brandon deWilde’s shortcomings a more serious weakness than they might otherwise be.  For all its faults, I was fascinated by the film.   Frankenheimer’s direction is uneven but All Fall Down is visually interesting all the way through.  It has a conventional ‘hopeful’ ending but this comes too late and too feebly to detract from the bizarre but unarguable emotional power of much of what’s gone before.

8 June 2012