An American Dream

Stuart Whitman plays a hard-hitting television journalist intent on taking on the mob with a rich, shrewish wife, Eleanor Parker. After he helps his wife take a nosedive over the balcony of her penthouse suite, she hits the car of the mafioso. Then, this flurry of coincidences continues as he discovers that one of the Mafiosos is dating his long lost love, Janet Leigh. Geez.

The lurid, over-the-top first act of this film caught my interest, but I only stayed with it as a morbid curiosity. The dialog was horrible. Perhaps they lifted it from Mailer's book, but literary dialog often makes for bad screen dialog. Even worse, now one in this film behaves like a real human being would behave. Stuart knows the police believe he murdered his wife, so what does he do? The night he is released from questioning, he immediately hooks up with his ex-girlfriend and sleeps with her! (This, despite the fact that he knows he is being followed the police!) The mafia don literally threatens Stuart in a room of police officers. Janet Leigh stays with him despite him calling her a whore. His father-in-law doesn't really seem to care whether his beloved daughter was murdered or not as long as her death isn't labeled suicide so that he bury her in a Catholic cemetery. I could go on and on.

The film is absurd. It deserves the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment. In the end, the most interesting thing was trying to figure out what TV shows from the '60s and '70s the supporting players ended up on.

The film was ridiculous but that theme song will live forever. A Time for Love, by Johnny Mandel, has an unforgettable melody and Mandel's arrangement, playing over the opening credits, was the best part of the movie. Vidal Sassoon also gets special mention for Janet Leigh's chic hairstyle. The pacing and direction were so weak, I lost interest early on. I was hoping the movie would be good but it wasn't. The five stars go to Johnny Mandel. The rest of the movie deserves a big fat zero.

This has every appearance of a mid-1960s contemporary television drama, filmed on 1960s television studio sets, using 1960s television lighting, using 1960s television music, with overskilled movie actors for the roles they're given. I expect an epilogue announcing "this is a quinn-martin production." t Janet Leigh's 1940 noir moll dialogue is ludicrous almost to the point of spoof. Eleanor Parker's portrayal is grotesque, indulgent, and minimally watchable. There are some interesting police procedural tidbits, almost lifted from Dragnet. J.D. Cannon is great as a Joe Friday with anger issues.

The two stars, Whitman and Leigh, seemed to take a mini-vacation from acting. They're both easy to watch, but seem distracted or tired or like they're donating their time for free. I don't know what the norman mailer novel was like, but I hope to god it wasn't like this movie.

A Norman Mailer novel gets filmed as if it's a Harold Robbins story. I knew I was in for a campy treat from the opening scenes, featuring Eleanor Parker as the rich, alcoholic harpy Deborah, rolling naked on silk sheets (the camera very careful not to show any naughty bits), demanding whiskey refills from her hunky bed partner with impudent hand gestures and burning his hand with a cigarette when he tries to initiate sex. "Later!" she barks, eyes glued to the TV, watching her husband Rojack (Stuart Whitman), the host of a controversial call-in show. Parker's high-rise wallow is so arresting that Rojack's accusations that the LAPD has a protection deal with a notorious Mafia kingpin hardly register. The action ramps up when Rojack visits his estranged wife. Parker, also in the notorious show biz howler "The Oscar" the same year this was released, goes for broke and over the top, hurling cutting insults and highballs at her square-jawed husband. As Rojack, Whitman stoically endures Deborah's rant until she pantomimes castrating him, and then all hell breaks loose. Rojack finally walks out, but barely makes it to the front door before he's confronted by Deborah's sexy maid (Susan Denberg), wrapped only in a towel but willing to drop it for her boss's husband. Rojack sidesteps the seduction, but in this movie that's actually the wrong decision. Returning to his wife's bedroom for his wallet, another mêlée ensues that ends with Deborah falling off the penthouse terrace, where she's immediately run over by a limo transporting the very same Mafia kingpin Rojack accused of being in bed—figuratively, of course—with the police.

Once Parker's out of the picture "An American Dream" becomes a little less interesting, though a few actors try to match her scenery chewing, J.D. Cannon as a hot-tempered cop chief among them. Janet Leigh as Cherry McMahon, Rojack's former flame prior to his marrying Deborah and now a singer/Mafia moll, does a lot of glaring and glowering. As many other reviewers have pointed out, this often looks like a TV movie, with much of the action happening in flatly lit, claustrophobic sets (though lushly photographed). As tacky as this movie is, the novel's story actually has been sanitized for the protection of 1966 audiences. Mailer's misogyny—the one quality he shared with hack Robbins—is left well intact, however. In "An American Dream," women are just bitches and/or hos.

Though not quite in the same league as other trash-tastic movies of the 1960s, fans of "The Carpetbaggers," "Valley of the Dolls," or the aforementioned "The Oscar," will want to be sure to catch "An American Dream." Fans of Norman Mailer are best advised to skip it.

Eleanor Parker is an embarrassment to acting. Her ugly and obnoxious portrayal of rich and spoiled socialite Deborah Kelly Rojack who goads her war hero husband Stephen Richard Rojack (Stuart Whitman) into a bedroom tussle that lands them both overhanging their penthouse balcony until she falls to her annoying death was pitiful.

Talk about overacting and a crummy screenplay that includes a jilted lover and dance hall singer to the mob, a girl named Cherry McMahon (Janet Leigh) and the murdered daughter's wealthy father Barney Kelly (Lloyd Nolan) all making our war hero turned TV broadcaster Stephen Richard Rojack a target for everyone including the mob.

The film tries in vain to build suspense with a penetrating music score and continued non-stop hurried dialogue between Stuart Whitman and EVERYONE and ANYONE else who shares screen time with him. Well it just does not work.

A most forgettable film worthy of a 3 out of 10 rating and nothing more.