No Down Payment
1957 · 105 min
Directed by Martin Ritt. Written by Ben Maddow, Philip Yordan. Starring Joanne Woodward, Sheree North, Tony Randall, Jeffrey Hunter.
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.
Streaming on Criterion Channel
How it got made
Writer Philip Yordan said both the film and the novel on which it was based was his idea. He said he read an article in Life magazine "about the building of these new subdivisions where there are no alleys, no separation, no neighborhood, no community. I had an idea about a no-down-payment subdivision of four houses." Yordan called paperback author John McPartland and paid him $7500 to write a novel based on Yordan's story, with Yordan keeping the film rights. Yordan then arranged for a publisher for the novel and estimated McPartland made $35,000 on the book.
Yordan sold the film rights to Fox and wrote the script. He said he wrote "a sex picture with the economics in there" but Martin Ritt "didn’t like all of the sex stuff in it. He was only interested in the economics." This meant Yordan "had to cut out all but just a little sex." According to Walter Bernstein, "No one knew that the script, attributed to Philip Yordan, had actually been written by Ben Maddow. Even Marty did not know."
At the box office
Yordan said that when the film was finished, Fox head Spyros Skouras felt the movie was "a leftist picture" and as a result "killed the picture."
Variety reported in January 1958 the film earned $1.2 million in North American rentals. By October 1958 the film earned between $2,500,000 and $3,000,000 worldwide. Wald claimed the film would only break even.