General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Arrangement (1969 film)

The Arrangement is a 1969 American drama film written, produced, and directed by Elia Kazan, adapted from his own best-selling 1967 novel of the same title. It stars Kirk Douglas as Eddie Anderson, a wealthy Los Angeles advertising executive who attempts suicide by crashing his sports car and then tries to rebuild his life, with Faye Dunaway as his mistress Gwen and Deborah Kerr as his wife Florence.¹^•² The film was a critical and commercial failure on release, though later assessments have found interest in Douglas's and Dunaway's performances and in the film's portrait of affluent Los Angeles.¹^•³

Key fact	Detail
Release	New York world premiere 18 November 1969; Los Angeles opening 19 December 1969¹
Director, writer, producer	Elia Kazan, adapting his own novel¹
Stars	Kirk Douglas (Eddie Anderson), Faye Dunaway (Gwen), Deborah Kerr (Florence Anderson)¹
Runtime and rating	125–127 minutes; rated R by the MPAA¹^•⁴
Production companies	Athena Enterprises Corp. and Warner Bros.–Seven Arts; distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures¹
Kazan's deal	$500,000 for the film rights plus $500,000 to produce and direct, with fifty percent of profits shared¹
Reception	8% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (12 reviews); 6.3/10 on IMDb from about 3,600 votes⁴^•²

Spoilers

Plot

Eddie Anderson is a successful, second-generation Greek-immigrant advertising executive with a luxurious Los Angeles estate, a wife, Florence, and a mistress, Gwen, his former assistant. While driving to his agency, he reacts to the din and bustle of the Los Angeles freeway by trying to kill himself: folding his arms and smiling, he steers his imported sports car into a truck. He survives, and convalescing at home he refuses to speak except to tell his boss, Finnegan, that he will not return.¹

Once he resumes speaking, two crises dominate. He renews his heedless attachment to Gwen, now in an ill-defined relationship with a man named Charles, and he confronts his conflicted loathing for his hospitalized Greek-immigrant father, played by Richard Boone. His wife Florence knows about Gwen, and the psychiatrist Dr. Leibman, engaged to treat Eddie, is told of this history by Florence, who reveals that Eddie's interest in sex ended when he broke off the affair.⁵^•¹ TIME summarized the premise as a man whose outwardly compartmentalized California career, the big advertising job for money and the little magazine articles for integrity, conceals a life that is a monumental counterfeit, ending in a lengthy crack-up and a flight back East to redemption.⁶

Production

Kazan told the New York Times in May 1966 that he had quit the theater in 1964, moved to rural Connecticut, and written the novel The Arrangement, which he called a continuation of his previous film America, America (1963) and the first thing he had ever written that was intended as a novel. He had first tried it as a screenplay, throwing away a hundred pages because he wanted to dig deeper into the character of Eddie Anderson, born Evangelos. Despite the autobiographical aspects, he insisted the character was not him: "If he's anybody, he's [playwright] Clifford Odets."¹

In June 1967 Warner Bros. signed a deal paying Kazan $500,000 for the film rights and another $500,000 to produce and direct, with the company sharing fifty percent of the profits. Kazan discussed the book's sexual content with MPAA head Jack Valenti, expecting to release under the then-new "M" rating, but the finished film received the restrictive "R" rating. Arthur Laurents was signed to write the screenplay but was ultimately not involved, and composer Manos Hadjidakis, signed in 1968, was likewise replaced; the final score is by David Amram.¹^•⁷

Marlon Brando, who had starred in Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, initially agreed to play Eddie Anderson before Kirk Douglas took the role. Principal photography began on 14 October 1968. A demolished Douglaston, New York mansion was reconstructed by Warner Bros. craftsmen so that special-effects technician Norman Skeeter could burn its façade on camera on 25 October 1968, with a replica façade later destroyed in a controlled burn on the Burbank lot. Filming also took place in Encino and Santa Barbara, California, and at Warner Bros. Studios.¹

The crew included cinematographer Robert Surtees, editor Stefan Arnsten, and production designer Gene Callahan; the film was shot in Technicolor and Panavision.¹

Reception

Reviews were negative from the start. The trade paper the Film Daily called the film "a confused, overly-contrived and overlength film peopled with a set of characters about whom the spectator couldn't care less" and judged the R rating, given for "four-letter words, skin shots and frank bedroom sequences," justified. The New York Times found the film "may be largely incomprehensible, on a simple narrative level" to viewers who had not read the novel, and in his year-end wrap-up critic Vincent Canby named The Arrangement one of "The Ten Worst Films of 1969." Warner Bros. publicly denied that Kazan was trying to re-edit the film before wide release on the basis of the downbeat reviews.¹

Box office. In its second week at thirty-five theatrical locations, sales were described as "meandering" at $167,000, after an opening week of $273,064.¹ Box Office Mojo records no domestic gross and lists only $9,536 worldwide, all from a 2003 French re-release.⁸

Later assessments. Roger Ebert, reviewing in December 1969, called it one of the long, ponderous, star-filled "serious" films popular in the 1950s and faulted Kazan's tone and time-skipping structure, but credited "the remarkable performances of Kirk Douglas and Faye Dunaway," whose scenes together he found absorbing and real.³ Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker, described the film as an autobiographical fantasy in which Kazan's voice cannot be separated from his hero's, and asked how he could "talk to us about spiritual renewal and make a film that looks like this—a big, cliché-riddled, false-eyelashes-in-bed, star-stoned movie?"⁹ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds 8% on the Tomatometer from 12 reviews and 63% from audiences.⁴

Themes and interpretation

The film is generally read as Kazan's most autobiographical work. MoMA's notes describe it as "a thinly veiled fictionalization of his own crumbling marriage and concurrent affair," while the TCM essay by Michael Atkinson argues the true measure of autobiography is unknown: according to Kazan's memoir A Life, he only fantasized about being liberated by a nervous collapse, and the overbearing wife played by Deborah Kerr was based not on his first wife, who died in 1963, but on Los Angeles wives he had met.¹⁰^•¹¹

Atkinson places the film in its 1969 context, as old-school Hollywood culture's awkward assimilation into the new environment of Easy Rider, Woodstock, and Vietnam, and notes Kazan's stylistic devices, mixing flashbacks into the present, jump cuts, associative montage, and bits of surrealism, in a widescreen mode unlike any other Kazan film. He reads the film as a portrait of Los Angeles materialism that its hero goes nearly insane reacting against, and as possibly the first of many American films about male menopause, if William Wyler's Dodsworth (1936) is not counted.¹¹ The French Larousse encyclopedia calls it the third part of a trilogy about America and Kazan's own origins.¹²

Home media and availability

The film was released on DVD by Warner Home Video on January 30, 2007.¹³ As of late 2026 it is available to rent for $3.99 or buy from $9.99 on digital platforms including Apple TV Store, Amazon Video, Google Play Movies, and YouTube, with no subscription-streaming or free options in the United States or the Netherlands.¹³^•¹⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026