Private Property movie review (1960)

The characterizations and performances are ultimately not as rewarding as one might hope, given how compelling the story is from its first frame. The motivations are too obviously informed by the pop-Freud and watered-down Marx that many 20^th century American writers mistook for depth and cultural context. Oates, almost ten years away from his rise to cult stardom and easily the best actor of the bunch, is a supporting player and spends much of the film seething silently while Allen, who’s touching and scary but distractingly self conscious, and Manx, who’s all sweetness and desperation and not enough suppressed hunger, occupy the film’s foreground. And although “Private Property” does a magnificent job of building tension throughout its first hour, its end game is disappointingly conventional, complete with music that tries to convince us that a domestic horror show is a happy ending. (In fairness, the same could be said for subsequent thrillers in the same vein, such as “Fatal Attraction,” “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle,” “Unlawful Entry” and “Pacific Heights.”)

That said, “Private Property” is a terrific example of the spell that a confident film can weave by placing a handful of troubled characters in a confined location, and in the end it does feel like as much of a tragedy as a potboiler. Even when Allen oversells or fumbles moments that a handsome-neurotic star of that same era (like Paul Newman) could’ve transformed into antihero black magic, the character still holds the screen, because there’s enough of the aggrieved child in Duke that you feel for him even when he’s being scary and disgusting. And Stevens and his cinematographer Ted McCord (“The Sound of Music”) come up with images that are metaphorically richer than Stevens' very best dialogue, such as a wide shot of Duke and Ann drunkenly slow-dancing into the deep background of a shot, their spiraling movements framed through a booze-smeared tumbler in the foreground.

Class resentment fuels a lot of the action. Duke’s monologues intellectualize the contempt that other working class men express openly for the rich wimps they believe are lording it over them with their fancy cars, big homes and fat bankrolls, and most of all, the beautiful young women they think they'd have a shot with if the financial playing field were level. (If Duke and Boots could know that guys like Roger barely give guys like them a second thought, they’d be even madder.) The movie offers evidence supporting the idea that to Roger, Ann is a possession like everything else he owns, although his kind but clueless smile in scenes where he brushes off her advances confirms that he would never describe their relationship that way. A dinner-table conversation between Ann and Robert, who seems to be about twenty years older than his wife, reveals that Ann was 19 when he met her. She wants kids. Roger is content to keep things status quo. When he shows her a blueprint of a boat he wants to build and casually mentions that it can house four people, Ann's face lights up as she repeats “Four?”, then falls as he amends it to two.