All Fall Down (1962)

I always thought Brandon De Wilde was kind of weird-looking as a child but cute as a teenager. He was sixteen or seventeen when he starred in Blue Denim (1959), based on the play by James Leo Herlihy about a 14-year-old boy trying to get an illegal abortion for his girlfriend. In 1962, he starred in All Fall Down based on the novel also by James Leo Herlihy.

In All Fall Down, Warren Beatty plays Berry-Berry, Brandon's older brother. Berry-Berry left home and has been traveling the country. The movie begins with Brandon taking the Greyhound to Florida to bring his brother $200 he needed to start a business. It turns out he's in jail and needs money for bail.

Berry-Berry has been living mostly as a gigolo. Women see him and instantly fall for him. He sits in a restaurant when a rich woman sees him and hires him to work on her yacht. Later, he's working at a gas station and leaves with a customer who wants him to join her on vacation.

According to Wikipedia, the critic for the New York Times "found the premise of the movie—that 'everyone in the story is madly in love with a disgusting young man who is virtually a cretin'—fatally flawed."

I thought the movie was similar to Hud made a year later with Paul Newman. Both were about Brandon De Wilde's character idolizing an unworthy adult.

Directed by John Frankenheimer. Angela Lansbury plays the boys' mother, similar in a way to the role she played in Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate released the same year. With Karl Malden as the father and Eva Marie Saint as the daughter of a family friend who stays with them while visiting the city.

I read the novel about twenty years ago. It was great, but it annoyed me a little that every character had some eccentricity. The father was a socialist, the mother was Angela Lansbury, Clinton (De Wilde) likes eavesdropping and transcribing what he hears in shorthand and Eva Marie Saint's character named Echo is an unlikely mechanic who drives a luxury car from the 1920's.

Herlihy also wrote the novel Midnight Cowboy.

Available on FilmStruck.