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With Harrison onstage night after night playing My Fair Lady, Kay spends her time touring theaters (she claims to have seen all on-and off-Broadway shows) or listening to American jazz (old Bessie Smith records) in their rented Manhasset, N.Y. home. "I've had too many years of rushing around from hotel to hotel and town to town and waking up alone in the morning." At 31, Kay Kendall says: "It's a joy for me to have a home, dogs and husband—not necessarily in that order."
No Down Payment (20th Century-Fox), based on the recent novel by John McPartland, puts itself forward as a fairly serious contribution in a field that only a dozen years ago was nothing but a dandelion patch: the sociology of the packaged community.
In the years since World War II millions of Americans have moved into thousands of new communities that have sprung full-furbished from an architect's brain. And the big housing developments —alternatively praised as the first fruits of social engineering, and damned as the most fantastically irreal estate since Prince Potemkin's villages—have had a drastic effect on the American way of life. But who can actually say what the effect has been? Have they created a split-level personality? Is the American male developing a barbecue pituitary or a carport stoop? Is his wife, with all her built-in conveniences, becoming a technological unemployee?
No Down Payment suggests some shocking answers. In this picture the dream houses of a short-drive-from-the-city development known as Sunrise Hills turn out to be nothing better than air-conditioned nightmares. The point is illustrated in the lives of eight inhabitants of this magnificently planned slum—four young couples "thrown together," as the book's blurb explains, "in the devastating intimacy of a four-house courtyard."
Couple One is a somewhat surreal composition: an oversexed grease monkey (Cameron Mitchell) married to what he calls, when he's sore at her, "common Tennessee dirt" (Joanne Woodward). The girl looks like a chippy, and she can drink like a French drain when she's a mind to, but all she really wants is Social Acceptance and A Baby of Her Own. He, on the other hand, is strictly a smalltime sadist whose idea of fun is to kill Japs, and whose ambition is to be the local chief of police.
Couple Two is the uneasy union of a shy young scientist (Jeffrey Hunter) and the sort of neighborhood flirt (Patricia Owens) who likes to bring out the beast in men, and then feed it peanuts.
Couple Three is a doomed duo: a used-car salesman (Tony Randall) in urgent need of a muffler on the mouth, and a girl (Sheree North) who looks as though five or six years of marriage have put 100,000 miles on her. The husband talks big, earns small, and drinks to forget the discrepancy. He dreams of the killing he will make some day, and never notices that he is murdering his wife by inches.
Couple Four personifies the steady and sane Joe and Jane (Pat Hingle and Barbara Rush)—he works hard in a hardware store; she is a well-shaped pillar of the church. But are they happy? No, the neighbors drive them crazy.