No Down Payment
Murderous Melodramas
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1h 41m
Directed by Martin Ritt • 1957 • United States
Starring Joanne Woodward, Sheree North, Tony Randall
Sex, alcoholism, and racial tensions roil a suburban California subdivision in this subversive deconstruction of 1950s conformity, which combines deep-dish melodrama with the socially conscious sensibility of director Martin Ritt and blacklisted leftist screenwriter Ben Maddow (with credited writer Philip Yordan acting as a front). Newlyweds David and Jean Martin (Jeffrey Hunter and Patricia Owens) move into Sunrise Hills looking for their slice of the American dream, only to discover that their neighbors—including Joanne Woodward as a restless housewife and Tony Randall as a hard-drinking philanderer—are concealing a hotbed of dysfunction behind their hypocritical facades.
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