Fall Up

Another movie that I watched off of my DVR recently was All Fall Down, which is yet another movie available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Brandon De Wilde plays Clinton Willart, a young man who's gone from his family home in Cleveland down to Key West, FL to see his beloved brother Berry-Berry (Warren Beatty, and yes, that's the character's bizarre name) with $200 that Berry-Berry wants in order to get going in the shrimp fishing industry. However, when Clinton gets to the hotel where his brother is supposedly staying, he's told that Berry-Berry is in jail! Apparently, Berry-Berry tried to beat the crap out of a hooker. That $200 would do fine for "bail", however, and oh, please get the hell out of Key West.

Clinton wants his brother to go back to Cleveland with him, but the two meet women while hitchhiking, and one of the women offers Berry-Berry a "job" of some sort on her yacht, so Berry-Berry departs and Clinton heads back to Cleveland. When he gets back, we find that his parents (Karl Malden and Angela Lansbury) came straight out of a Tennessee Williams play, except that All Fall Down is based on a novel by some guy whose name I didn't recognize at first (James Leo Herlihy, who also wrote the book behind Midnight Cowboy) and the screenplay was adapted by William Inge of Picnic fame. Clinton is the closest to sane that the family has, although even he keeps copious notebooks of other people's conversations.

Into this wacky family comes the daughter of a family friend, Echo (Eva Marie Saint). She's a working girl who is also into being a bit of a car mechanic to work on her own car, and for the first time in his live Clinton finds a woman he thinks he can love, even though she's much older than he is. Echo really likes Clinton, although how much of it is friendship and how much love is an open question.

Berry-Berry gets off that yacht at some point, as he's working as a service station attendant at the sort of service station the guy from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg dreamt of opening, thankfully minus the singing since I don't think anybody wants to hear him sing. He hits on a woman going north, eventually becoming her driver although she's stopping in Lousiville. He gets in a fight with her in a bar on Christmas Eve and winds up back in jail.

Dad wires Berry-Berry the money to get out of jail, and eventually Berry-Berry shows up in Cleveland. He meets Echo, and immediately starts putting the moves on her, despite the fact that Clinton feels way too much love for Echo. Berry-Berry being a jerk, however, he causes a whole bunch of problems leading to the film's denouement.

For fairly obvious reasons, while watching All Fall Down I couldn't help but think of Brandon De Wilde a year later in Hud. De Wilde is quite good here, but he's the only one of the four Willarts who is any good. I don't know if the problem is with the script, or with the actors playing things to be way overheated (hence my mention of Tennessee Williams earlier). Malden, Lansbury, and Beatty are all irritating, so I think I'd have to lay the fault for that at the hands of the director, the normally talented John Frankenheimer.

One other thing I didn't like was that the first act of the movie set down in Florida was nicely evoactive with all the location shooting. But when they got back to Cleveland, the house was so obviously on the MGM backlot that it was jarring. Maybe they blew the budget on the location shooting, but whatever they did, the contrast is not to the movie's benefit.

I've read any number of reviews that praise the acting in All Fall Down, however, so this is another one where perhaps you may want to watch for yourself in order to judge it.