Kirk Douglas wears a porn 'stache!

So I watched The Arrangement off my DVR, since it's available on DVD. Kirk Douglas plays Eddie Anderson, an ad exec in Los Angeles who has it all: a wife Florence (Deborah Kerr), a big house with a three-car garage, and a fantastic porn 'stache. But apparently something is wrong in his life. As he's driving into work one day, he gets stuck between two semis and suddenly swerves to drive under one of them, an obvious attempt to kill himself.

But he ducked at the last moment, so he only wound up in the hospital, not too badly off, all things considered. However, he's decided he's not going to talk, just going over everything in his life that led up to this mid-life crisis.

The big thing is that he had a mistress Gwen (Faye Dunaway), and that complicated relationship went wrong as she decided to go back to the east coast. Eddie is going to have a chance to renew that relationship when he has to go back to New York after his Greek immigrant father (Richard Boone) falls ill. Meanwhile, the Andersons' lawyer Arthur (Hume Cronyn) is trying to get power of attorney to keep the erratic Eddie from spending all the money, and Florence is trying to get her analyst to analyze Eddie. It goes on like this.

Frankly, I think the movie is terrible. The narrative with all its flashbacks isn't easy, but is the least of the movie's problems. Eddie is just such a blankety-blank for nothing other than capricious reasons; Florence isn't so nice either; and the movie gives everybody terrible dialogue.

As I was watching it, I got the desire to look at the IMDb reviews to see how many of them thought the movie was making some sort of brilliant statement about suburbia and if any of them would mention Douglas Sirk. I didn't see Sirk's name pop up, but sure enough, there were a distressing number of comments that basically said that because this movie was criticizing suburbia, therefore it was good. Nonsense.

Of course, you should always judge for yourself, but The Arrangement is an overrated mess.