Besides Breaking Away (1979) and The Swimmer (1968), the other two features that I would want to program – if selected to be a guest of Robert Osborne on TCM – would also deal with disillusionment. One stars (swimmer) Burt Lancaster’s frequent co-star Kirk Douglas, also as a corporate executive, in a similarly unusual and introspective drama that lacked wide box office appeal, and the other features terrific performances by two lead actors that had previously earned Academy Award recognition: Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn. Ironically, both of these selections received an award as the Best Foreign Film from the Cinema Writers Circle in Spain, a fact that I learned while doing research for this article.

The Arrangement (1969) is a somewhat overlong melodrama about a businessman’s mid-life crisis and, given the year that it was released, it was one of the first movies to deal with this subject, giving an insightful view of what has now become a rather cliche topic. Elia Kazan produced and directed this film, based on his own popular novel, which on some levels is not unlike Federico Fellini’s personal 8 ½. I admit that it’s a chore at times to slog through this one, but it does contain an element of truth if you’re patient enough to wait nearly two hours for it. Douglas plays a rainmaker advertising that appears to have everything going for him, including a beautiful loyal wife (played by Deborah Kerr) who tolerates his extramarital indiscretions. She’s especially tolerant of his relationship with Faye Dunaway’s character (not a lot different from Dunaway’s Best Actress Oscar winning role as William Holden’s muse-mistress in Network (1976)), even when she’d realized that it was more than just physical. But Eddie (Douglas) disrupts his seemingly perfect life when he attempts to commit suicide and then refuses to go back to work. This baffles his bosses, but his wife thinks that it’s because of Gwen (Dunaway); she’s right, but her assumption that her husband wants to be with his mistress instead of her is wrong. Gwen had helped Eddie to realize that he’d sold his soul to the devil for his multimillion dollar client, a tobacco company whose cigarette advertisements play constantly on every radio and television station, so his suicide attempt was more about self loathing than the demanding mistress he’d left more than a year earlier. Another of Eddie’s demons is a dysfunctional relationship with his father (Richard Boone), an immigrant and a self-made successful merchant that had wanted his son to assume the family business. The plot develops slowly and the story is told out of sequence at times, which is also a fundamental characteristic of my last choice:

Two for the Road (1967) is an insightful mature look at marriage told in a nonlinear way as a road picture (the couple is always traveling) by director-producer Stanley Donen that stars Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney as the titled two. If you haven’t been married for a dozen or more years, you probably won’t appreciate how truthful this comedy romance drama is. The story of the couple is told as a series of vignettes, brilliantly edited together non-sequentially, to detail a twelve year relationship between the Finney and Hepburn characters. It includes their beginning (e.g. how they met & fell in love), their hilarious honeymoon road-trip across Europe with another married couple (William Daniels and Eleanor Bron, who plays Finney’s first love from his college days!) that overindulges their precocious six year old, their first two years of marital bliss, their child rearing years (he’s an overworked architect with a demanding boss that’s struggling to make a name for himself while she’s a near single mother), his successful career years which is a disillusioning time for both of them and, ultimately, their acceptance of one another – as “bitch” and “bastard” – which enables their reconciliation. Frederic Raphael (Darling (1965)) earned his second and last Academy Award nomination for his Original Story and Screenplay, Written Directly for the Screen. Note that nonlinear movie stories have been around for more than forty years and are not, as some would have you believe, a new phenomena.

Each of these two choices should be in the TCM library, though I’ve never seen the former on the channel before, and all four of my picks could be packaged together for a disillusionment theme night!

One more thing:

Happy (posthumous) Birthday to Marjorie Rambeau, no relation that I know of, a character actress that earned two (supporting) Academy Award nominations during her career (for Primrose Path (1940) and Torch Song (1953)), which began in silent films. I have to admit that I haven’t seen a lot of her movies; she did appear in Min and Bill (1930) with Marie Dressler (her Oscar winning role) and Wallace Beery. Rambeau played Bella Pringle, who learns Min’s secret and therefore must be silenced; she also appeared with Clark Gable in Hell Divers (1931) and as Mrs. Harlan in the hilarious My Man Godfrey-like screwball comedy Merrily We Live (1938).