All Fall Down, starring Warren Beatty, Eva Marie Saint, Brandon De Wilde, Karl Malden, and Angela Lansbury, directed by John Frankenheimer (1962)

Warren Beatty in All Fall Down, 1962. Author Ellis Amburn used this photo for the cover of his biography of Beatty, The Sexiest Man Alive.

Warren Beatty, Angela Lansbury, Brandon De Wilde, and Eva Marie Saint in a scene from All Fall Down, 1962.

Warren Beatty’s third film, All Fall Down, from 1962, is not that great. The movie boasts an impressive pedigree, as it was produced by John Houseman, directed by John Frankenheimer, and also stars Eva Marie Saint, Angela Lansbury, Karl Malden, and Brandon De Wilde. The script was by playwright William Inge, famous for plays like Picnic, and Bus Stop. Inge adapted All Fall Down from the novel of the same name by James Leo Herlihy, who would go on to write the novel Midnight Cowboy. Inge was an important benefactor in the early career of Warren Beatty, as he had also written Beatty's first movie, Splendor in the Grass, and Beatty's first and only Broadway play, A Loss of Roses. All Fall Down is an offbeat story about a dysfunctional family. If the movie were made today, it would be a quirky indie movie, and it would probably be played for more laughs. 

Beatty plays a callous ladies’ man with the improbable name of Berry-Berry Willart. No, really. And by the end of the movie you will be very sick of hearing other characters say the name “Berry-Berry.” His name is mentioned about every third line. Lansbury plays another one of her overbearing mother roles, just as she would play Laurence Harvey’s overbearing mother in Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, released later in 1962. Like her character in The Manchurian Candidate, Lansbury’s mother in All Fall Down seems to have an unhealthy obsession with her son Berry-Berry. There’s even a moment in All Fall Down where it looks like she is about to kiss her son on the lips, but she just gets very close to Berry-Berry and then runs away. This prefigures a famous moment in The Manchurian Candidate when Lansbury’s character kisses her son on the lips. This one moment tells us all we need to know about their relationship. Another similarity between the two films is that Lansbury is playing characters much older than herself, as she was not old enough to be the mother of the men who were playing her onscreen sons. In real life, Lansbury was just three years older than Laurence Harvey, eleven years older than Beatty, and nine years older than Elvis Presley-whose mother she played in Blue Hawaii, from 1961. (There are no Freudian overtones in Blue Hawaii, however.) 

The story of All Fall Down is told from the point of view of Berry-Berry’s 16-year-old little brother, Clinton, played very well by Brandon De Wilde, whose most famous role was the little boy in Shane. De Wilde played a very similar part the following year in Hud, where he plays little brother to Paul Newman’s amoral Hud. Both Berry-Berry and Hud are completely selfish people, leaving a trail of emotional wreckage behind them. 

Beatty as Berry-Berry is very much in James Dean mode, as he was in his first movie, Splendor in the Grass, which is a much better film than All Fall Down. Beatty broods, and though Berry-Berry attracts women like flies, he quickly discards them in very hurtful ways, often using physical violence. It’s rather ridiculous how easily women are attracted to Beatty in the movie. All it takes is one look at Beatty for them to suddenly offer to bring him along on a vacation with them. Of course, Beatty was a stunning physical specimen in 1962, with his full head of dark hair, piercing blue eyes, and full lips. But it gets tiring to see women fall all over themselves for him. One woman even says to him, “If I were a young man as handsome as you are, I would go to Hollywood and try to get into movies.” Berry-Berry is very similar to the role that Beatty had just finished playing, the gigolo Paulo in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. There’s nothing redeeming about Berry-Berry’s character, even though his parents hold him up as the ideal son. 

Things start happening in All Fall Down when the daughter of a family friend, Echo, played by Eva Marie Saint, comes to town to stay with them. The first time she stays with them, Clinton falls deeply in love with her, even though she’s a much “older woman” of 31, who has never been married. When Berry-Berry meets Echo the second time she stays with the family, he literally doesn’t have to say a word to her, he just takes her hand in the backyard and they go off somewhere to make out. And Clinton is heartbroken at this turn of events. Karl Malden plays the ineffectual alcoholic father, and does the most he can with the part. But he is incapable of offering advice or wisdom to his two sons. (Malden and Marie Saint famously worked together before in On the Waterfront.) Berry-Berry and Echo start dating, his mother claims she is happy for them, Berry-Berry gets Echo pregnant, they have an argument, he leaves, and she drives off grief-stricken and dies in a car crash. We don’t really know if the car crash is an act of suicide or not, but my guess is that it probably was. Side note: given their ridiculous names, what on earth would Berry-Berry and Echo have named their baby? One shudders to think. Clinton then almost shoots Berry-Berry, but decides not to, leaving Berry-Berry to deal with the fact that he’s a jerk who ruins every significant relationship in his life. The end. Not an especially uplifting movie. 

So that’s the movie, an overheated pseudo-Freudian mishmash, with some teen angst thrown in for good measure. One of the oddest moments in the movie is the scene where Echo tells Lansbury’s character how her former boyfriend killed himself-carbon monoxide poisoning, which is the same way that screenwriter William Inge would kill himself eleven years later. Ugh. 

Behind the scenes, Warren Beatty rubbed everybody the wrong way from day one of rehearsal, and no one except for Karl Malden really liked him. Beatty’s penchant for Method-y brooding annoyed the other actors and won him no friends. To be fair to Beatty, at the time he was making All Fall Down in the summer of 1961 he was getting a lot of media attention as the “Next Big Thing,” but none of his movies had been released yet. Splendor in the Grass, Beatty’s very first movie, wasn’t released until October, 1961. Beatty may have been feeling a lot of pressure to live up to his publicity hype. And his fellow actors had not had a chance to see him act on screen, so they had no idea who this guy was. Beatty might also have been intimidated by the success of his fellow actors, who had all been in the business for a long time. At the time Beatty was making All Fall Down, he was a man who was famous, but not because of anything he had actually accomplished. He was famous because he was Shirley MacLaine’s kid brother, and because he was having very public romances with Joan Collins and Natalie Wood. (Beatty was accused of breaking up Wood’s first marriage to Robert Wagner.) Beatty was famous because of his personal life, not because of any talent he showed as an actor. This must have annoyed Beatty considerably, since he is ironically a very private man who doesn’t like discussing his personal life. This mistake early in his career of letting his private life become so public perhaps set the tone for the rest of his career. Also, Beatty had a tendency to date women at the absolute peak of their fame. Had he wanted less publicity about his private life, he should have started dating women who were not in show business. 

After an amazing start in movies in Splendor in the Grass, Beatty appeared in two duds in quick succession, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, which was released in December, 1961, and All Fall Down, which was released in April, 1962. Beatty then took a long break from movies; turning down everything he was offered, including the part of a young John F. Kennedy in PT 109. (Cliff Robertson ending up playing Kennedy.) Given all that we now know about Kennedy’s sexual life, Beatty probably would have been an ideal choice. After All Fall Down, Beatty didn’t appear onscreen again until Lilith, released two and a half years later. Beatty didn’t make another hit movie until 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, which finally confirmed his talent as an actor and producer.

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, starring Warren Beatty and Vivien Leigh, written by Tennessee Williams (1961)

Vivien Leigh and Warren Beatty in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, 1961.

Beatty, Leigh, and Beatty's fiancee Joan Collins play cards on the set.

After making his movie debut in Splendor in the Grass, (1961), Warren Beatty’s second movie was The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, which was also released in 1961. But where Splendor had been a triumph, Roman Spring was a flop. Like Splendor, which was written by William Inge, Roman Spring also had an impressive writing pedigree, as it was based on a novel by Tennessee Williams. The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone was the only movie directed by Jose Quintero, who was most famous as a stage director. Quintero had a lot of success directing the plays of Eugene O’Neill. The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone also starred the great actress Vivien Leigh as Mrs. Stone. Leigh was only in her late 40’s when the movie was made, but she was unfortunately very near to the end of her career and life. In the 1950’s she was still starring in many stage productions-mainly opposite her then-husband, Laurence Olivier, but she had not made a film since 1955’s The Deep Blue Sea. Leigh had won two Best Actress Oscars for her iconic roles in Gone With the Wind, and A Streetcar Named Desire. Leigh and Olivier divorced in 1960, just before Leigh filmed Roman Spring. The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone would be the second to last movie she appeared in. Her last role was in Ship of Fools in 1965, and she died of tuberculosis in 1967 at the age of 53. 

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone tells the story of an aging actress, Karen Stone, played by Leigh, who is about to take a trip to Rome with her husband. He suffers a heart attack on the plane and dies. She goes on to Rome, rents an apartment, and meets a young Italian gigolo named Paolo, played by Beatty. Although Beatty has the right physical attributes of an attractive young man on the make, he is severely miscast as an Italian. Beatty is not a character actor, and his accent wavers. Defending the casting, screenwriter Gavin Lambert said, “We did look at a couple of Italian actors, but they didn’t have that sort of charisma and sexual dynamism that Warren had.” (Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, by Peter Biskind, p. 43.) Well, if they were looking for charisma and sexual dynamism, Warren Beatty certainly had both. Believability as an Italian? Not so much. So Mrs. Stone and Paolo have an affair, and she falls in love with him. But Paolo only loves himself, and his attention soon turns towards a young starlet, played by Jill St. John. A theme throughout the movie is the mysterious young man who stands on the street outside Mrs. Stone’s apartment and stares up at her. Who is he? What does he want? Paolo has a speech at some point in the movie where he talks to Mrs. Stone about a young man coming up to her apartment, making love to her, and then killing her. (Oddly enough, Beatty has an identical speech about going to a woman’s apartment, making love to her, and then killing her in his next movie, All Fall Down.) Paolo leaves Mrs. Stone, and at the end of the movie we see her throw her apartment keys to the mysterious young man in the street. He enters her apartment and we fade out, and presumably he makes love to her and then kills her. Wait, what? Why does Mrs. Stone effectively commit suicide? I have no idea. Part of the ridiculousness of the movie now, 50 years later, is that Mrs. Stone isn’t that old. Sure, maybe in the early 1960’s she seemed old, but now? She’s nearing 50, and in today’s culture that’s not old. People nearing 50 still have a ton of life left in them. So the idea that she’s just embracing death and waiting to die seems rather silly. 

Personally, I think The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is a very unsuccessful movie. I just wasn’t invested in these characters at all. Paolo is a jerk, and very unsympathetic. And I didn’t really care what happened to Mrs. Stone, either. Although I certainly didn’t want her to be killed by the creepy stalker guy. Ugh, such a depressing and senseless ending. There’s not much dramatic tension in the story, there’s nothing moving it forward or giving the story any sense of urgency. Will Mrs. Stone keep sleeping with the jerky gigolo with the wavering accent? I don’t really care!

Leigh gives a good performance, and she does the most she can with the material. Beatty is miscast, and the whole Italian accent just had him hamstrung from the very beginning. Also weighing against Beatty is the fact that Paolo is a totally unsympathetic character. There’s no reason for the audience to like him. Beatty is also at his best when there’s some comedy in a script, and there’s no comedy in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.

Beatty actively campaigned for the role of Paolo, perhaps in an attempt to play a very different kind of character from Bud Stamper, the role he played in Splendor in the Grass. Beatty even went so far as to fly to Puerto Rico to convince Tennessee Williams to cast him. Beatty says, “I thought, An Italian, he should be darker than I was, so I got something called Man-Tan. You put it on your face and you turned a sort of an orange-yellow. I found an Italian with an accent. I worked with him for two days. I got what I considered to be an Italian suit. I put on the suit. I put on the Man-Tan. I put on the accent, and I flew to San Juan.” Beatty then found Williams gambling in the hotel. Williams was recovering from ulcers, and Beatty told a waiter to bring Williams a glass of milk. As Beatty says, “In those days, they treated ulcers with milk. My father had ulcers, and he drank milk all the time, which, by the way, is the worst thing you can do. Milk is very irritating to the mucus membrane of the stomach.” (Biskind, p. 43.) Williams told Beatty that he had the part. It’s rather funny to imagine Beatty, with his fake tan and phony accent, trying to convince Williams to cast him. I’m sure that Beatty’s good looks and charm helped him immensely.

At the time Roman Spring was filmed, Beatty was engaged to the British starlet Joan Collins, but their relationship was nearing its end. Vivien Leigh apparently didn’t care for Collins appearing on the set, as Leigh had a crush on Beatty. The card game pictured above with Beatty, Leigh, and Collins must have been a tense one! Did Beatty and Leigh have an affair? There are rumors they did, but there’s not much evidence beyond hearsay to support it. Beatty himself had only kind things to say about Leigh: “Well that was a childhood crush and it never became any other way…she was a lovely person, a terrific lady, made me feel immensely important, and she was beautiful to look at.” (Warren Beatty: A Private Man, by Suzanne Finstad, p. 253.) As a young man, Beatty really went out of his way to cultivate friendships with older people-like director Elia Kazan, playwright William Inge, and author Clifford Odets. While one could be cynical and say that Beatty was merely making these connections in order to further his own career, it seems clear to me that he looked up to these men as role models. Sure, they might have helped him get work, but he was also looking to them for advice about life. Making the movie The Only Game in Town just so he could work with the great director George Stevens is an example of this. Stevens was past his prime, and The Only Game in Town was neither a great script nor a good movie, so it really took something on Beatty’s part to accept the role just to learn from Stevens. Beatty was obviously at ease around older people, even as a young man. But his respect for his elders and his affection for Vivien Leigh didn’t stop him from being constantly late to the set. Director Jose Quintero said, “Out of what I can only imagine to be insecurity, he was arrogant and huffy to Vivien. He kept people waiting.” (Finstad, p. 253.) Ah, the contradiction that is Warren Beatty! I would guess that Quintero hit the nail on the head; Beatty probably was insecure, especially sharing most of his scenes with a legend like Vivien Leigh. Again, as I said in my post about All Fall Down, this isn’t meant to excuse Beatty’s behavior, but just to try and understand it. He may have felt insecure opposite Vivien Leigh, as she was a veteran actress who had been married to Laurence Olivier, considered the greatest actor of the 20^th century, and here’s Beatty, touted as the “next big thing,” and he’s only made one movie which hasn’t even been released yet. Leigh probably had no idea who he was when he was cast in the role, and she probably hadn’t seen any footage from Splendor in the Grass, so she had no idea how good of an actor Beatty was. Also, Beatty probably knew he was in over his head, playing a part with an accent he couldn’t master, with a not-so-great script. 

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone was released in late December, 1961, just months after Splendor in the Grass came out. Anyone who saw Splendor and who was hoping to see more of the magnetic young actor who seemed like the next James Dean must have been disappointed if they saw Roman Spring.

Two incidental notes that I found interesting about Beatty at this time: In my last post about McCabe & Mrs. Miller, I joked that it was a good thing that Beatty never worked with Stanley Kubrick, another perfectionist famed for shooting numerous takes. Well, I read that while shooting Mrs. Stone in England, Beatty hung out a lot with Kubrick, who was shooting Lolita at the same studio. Later, in 1963, when Beatty was trying to make What’s New, Pussycat? he tried to persuade Kubrick to direct it. But that project fell apart for Beatty, and he ended up not being cast in the movie. 

Shortly after filming Mrs. Stone, Beatty spent an evening with the Italian director Luchino Visconti, who apparently wanted Beatty to play a part in his movie The Leopard, starring Burt Lancaster. The part that Visconti wanted Beatty for was eventually played by Alain Delon, which makes perfect sense, since Delon is basically the French Warren Beatty.