From the Terrace

Paul Newman had a great long career, but an actor can't work diligently for that many years without making some clunkers, and Newman made his share. One of them was From the Terrace, an adaptation of a long John O'Hara novel, directed by Mark Robson and written by Ernest Lehman. Robson was trying to duplicate his success with Peyton Place, so he made another film in CinemaScope, lit with autumnal hues and dealing with the sordid underbelly of respectable citizens. As with Peyton Place, From the Terrace is heavy on the melodrama and light on nimbleness.

Newman stars as a young man back from World War II. He returns to his parents in a Philadelphia suburb. Dad is a horrible autocrat, Mom is a lush and philanderer. Newman spurns his father's wishes that he go into business with him in their steel mill, and instead heads to New York to start an aircraft business with his college buddy. At a party he is dazzled by a society deb, Joanne Woodward, and overcomes her initial distaste in him (shades of The Long, Hot Summer) and marrying her. Through some serendipity he ends up working on Wall Street and long absences from his marital bed send Woodward into the arms of her ex-fiance, played with sleazy charm by Patrick O'Neal. When Newman, on a business trip to a Pennsylvania coal town, meets a young woman (Ina Balin) with simple, small-town values, he falls in love with her, but divorce is out of the question.

This film came out in 1960, and there were a lot of books and films in those days about the disillusion suffered by men who thought they were supposed to do everything they could do to get ahead, especially The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and, interestingly enough, Revolutionary Road, which was made into a movie now in theaters. The underlying core of this film is that all that glitters is not gold, but it takes Newman's character a long time to figure that out. The last five minutes of the film, where Newman takes actions to ensure his integrity, are pretty satisfying, but it's a two-hour and twenty-four minute film, so there's a lot of mush to wade through to get there.

Newman is solid, but seems at a loss much of the time is to what this guy is all about. Early in the film the family's servants talk about how wonderful he is, but there's nothing he does through most of the film to show him as such a wonderful guy. Woodward and Balin are really playing female stereotypes--Woodward as the scheming society woman, Balin as the down-home innocent, and there's not much else there. Myrna Loy has a nice turn as Newman's mother, but she disappears from the film after the first twenty minutes.

There are couple of future TV stars on hand--Blossom Rock, who was Grandmama on The Addams Family, is a maid, and American's favorite genie, Barbara Eden, has one scene as a promiscuous young woman. Oh, Jeannie!