An American Dream (1966)

A TV talk show host (Stuart Whitman) is married to a wealthy but promiscuous shrew (Eleanor Parker). She attacks him in one of her drunken rages and he pushes her off the penthouse balcony. Based on the novel by Norman Mailer and directed by Robert Gist. Perfectly dreadful! There's a good movie to be made out of Mailer's novel but this wasn't it and it's unlikely to be rectified anytime soon. Pauline Kael remarked that John Huston was the man to direct it and she wasn't far off. Instead we get a TV director who was once married to Agnes Moorehead. From the opening credits layered over pink satin with Johnny Mandel's elegant cocktail jazz music, it's clear they have it all wrong and the first shot of a nude Eleanor Parker wearing only sunglasses and pearls lounging on a fur bedspread conjures up Harold Robbins, not Norman Mailer and the film continues to mutilate the novel. Then Parker's shrieking banshee performance flings the movie into bad movies we can't resist territory though after Parker's spectacular fall, the "fun" goes with her. Alas, it's not bad enough to be compelling. With one exception, the acting is appalling and Whitman and Janet Leigh as his ex-girlfriend suffer through the film's worst lines (though Leigh is given the movie's best and last line). It also has the awful TV look that so many Universal films (yes, I know it's a Warners movie) from the 1960s had. Only two things elevate it from its tawdriness. Lloyd Nolan does the only good acting as Parker's father and Johnny Mandel's moody score gives the film a class it doesn't warrant. With Barry Sullivan, Murray Hamilton, J.D. Cannon, Warren Stevens, Les Crane and Paul Mantee.