The marital difficulties of four couples living in a southern California housing development become intertwined. Among the unhappy couples are ne'er-do-well Jerry Flagg and his long-suffering wife Isabelle, flirtatious Leola Boone and her sadistic husband Troy, hard-working Herman Kreitzer and his understanding wife Betty, and newlyweds Jean and David Martin.
You can easily imagine the land of opportunity in the late 1950s with new family homes being built full of all the mod cons. Ideally for upwardly mobile couples and families. This film follows four such couples who live in their suburban utopia only to find that each of them have foibles that range from booze to infidelity, brutality to racism - indeed each of these pairings has something of the unsavoury about them which all comes out in the wash as we watch their lives unravel before us. For it's time, its quite specific about the single event that serves to focus the attention and force them to recalibrate their somewhat shallow lives and it's probably Joanne Woodward ("Leola") who stands out most amongst a cast that includes Jeffery Hunter, a rather effective effort from Tony Randall as the unscrupulous car salesman and Cameron Mitchell as the brutish "Troy". It runs a little too much to melodrama for me, the gradual decline of their dreams is all just a bit predictable and at times, just a wee bit contrived. It does serve well as a microcosm of society, of values and ambition however, and it also clearly demonstrates just how the "if your face fits" mentality prevailed at the time. Worth a watch on that basis, and for an on form Woodward too.
