A Brilliant Conflict

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Intelligent and observant drama of small town lives in the 1920s. Robert Preston is a Midwestern family man and traveling salesman who loses his job, fights with his wife (who accuses him of infidelity), and walks out of the house all on the same day. The screenwriters, Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch, adapting the celebrated play by William Inge, allow for smart, pungent, often amusing interplay between husband and wife, the couple and their in-laws, mother and son, and father and daughter. There's also a beautifully modulated sequence between Preston and Angela Lansbury, playing the local beautician who wouldn't mind dallying with a married man--though this one sees her as just a friend. The picture runs too long, and features too much of budding teenager Shirley Knight and her blind date (the atrociously mannered Lee Kinsolving). Preston, too, is often overstated in his approach to the central role, while spouse Dorothy McGuire has to contend with unflattering costumes and the proverbial wifely hang-ups (she's frigid in the bedroom, she treats her husband like another child, etc.). The film has that phony Warner Bros. backlot appearance that dogged so many of their period films for decades, and a few of the speeches are underlined with a high-toned literacy that doesn't have the ring of natural conversation. Delbert Mann's direction is uneven and the camera-work is barely adequate, however this character piece has interesting people, engaging grown-up talk and some surprising candor and wit. **1/2 from ****

Starting with a stellar cast, Eve Arden is a jewel as always, this movie made at a time when certain words and certain subjects were taboo managed to hit on various subjects. Bigotary, adultery, dysfunctional family, death etc. Robert Preston and Dorothy McGuire are the Floods who the story centers around while Angela Lansbury and Lee Kinsolving lend splendid support as does the rest of the cast. Given the time this movie was made and the censorship in place at the time this movie should be a must see for adults due to the subject matter involved. So give yourself a treat and watch this jewel if you get the chance. You won't be disappointed.

I've only seen this film two times. The first one was when I was a teenager, in the early 60s, and the other one was on TV, not so long ago. As it had happened in the first time, viewing "The Dark at the Top of the Stairs" again gave me the same feeling: in spite of being a very American movie in all its aspects, it has a strong and universal appeal because it deals with people with flesh and blood, not puppets or flat characters. But what I consider appalling is the callousness of movie distributors who haven't so far given us the chance to see and buy this little gem either in VHS or DVD. According to the reliable Halliwell's Film Guide, this was produced by Warner Bros. Why don't they release it now in either of these formats, or, better still, in both? Maybe they lack what this movie is plentifully supplied with, that is, "a real feeling for the people and the place", in Halliwell's words.

Robert Preston will be forever remembered as "The Music Man"-and well he should be. However, he gave many other fine performances, and one of the best was as Rubin Flood in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs.Dwight McDonald once wrote an essay mocking "Ingeland and Kazanistan", and he may have had a point. At the same time, the series of films based on William Inges plays includes some of the best dramas of the fifties and early sixties..still, perhaps the most underrated period of Amnerican film.This film is not just an example of sentimental "americana". Though set in the past, it is not an exercise in simplistic nostalgia. Instead it reveals the sexual repression, Anti-Semitism,and snobbery which poisoned American life in the early part of this century.However, it does not simply look at the past from a standpoint of smug superiority. Instead, it suggests the dignity and inner strength of these people, as they struggled with economic and moral uncertainty.It has a superficially "happy' ending', yet it is still a sad and troubling portrait of the fragility of quotidian existence.