This dramatic film was a creature of its time, dealing with a topical sociological issue of the growing Suburbia of the '50s. I enjoyed it, and have a particular recollection of how it symbolized changing attitudes towards cinema as well as more general changes in American society.
At my junior high school in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, they had the unusual practice of projecting fairly recent feature films during the lunch hour, one reel a day. (A normal length movie would be completed in the five week days, one 20-minute reel at a time.) The charge was 4 cents if you had exact change in pennies, or otherwise a nickel - just like the nickelodeons that started it all 50 years earlier. "No Down Payment" was one of the movies screened.
It's now over 50 years since that time, and the main subject matter of this film is dated, though its overall dramatic thrust has not. For me it represents an interesting incident that made no headlines, and likely has never been reported at all till my current submission to IMDb.
Our series consisted of major studio product, from 20th Century-Fox (it had a hyphen in those days), UA and Paramount, and the movies were just a year or two old at the time of rental by the school. Recall, in those days there was no home video, the TV packages for syndication were not from the majors usually, and the second-run theaters were on the verge of their eventual death spiral (drive-ins continued to prosper, however).
Most of the films we watched were age-appropriate, even though the content was hardly educational - "Enemy from Space" and "Spacemaster X-7" were my favorites from this noontime series. But occasionally a higher profile film was shown, in this case the A-movie with big stars, "No Down Payment".
I never got to see the end of "No Down Payment" back in 1959 when we screened it, because half-way through the film, when Cameron Mitchell's intimations of rape were portrayed on the Silver Screen, the next day no further reels were forthcoming. The school clamped down censorship and we were left hanging (I saw the entire film on TV many years later).
In the '50s movies that were generally released, certainly from the majors, were all G-rated, before the modern rating system was invented in 1968. There were soft- core porn movies that would later play at burlesque houses or so-called Adult cinemas, but basically Family Entertainment prevailed everywhere. So this informal banning of "No Down Payment" stuck with me as a minor milestone in my growing movie buff career, later to turn into a career as a professional film critic (I even served one year as chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle, decades later).
The irony, of course, is that those sci-fi movies of my youth, which were acceptable fluff for our noontime viewing, later morphed into the extremely expensive A movies of recent decades, those tiresome "tent-poles" that keep studios like Paramount and 20th Century Fox afloat (United Artists having become a fictitious studio due to many sales of its assets, with even its "tent-pole" James Bond series now reassigned to the equally extinct MGM label for release by Sony through its hardly resembling the original Columbia banner).
The serious movies like Martin Ritt's "No Down Payment" are an endangered species -try and find an Adult (in the best sense of that misused term) title on Paramount's recent schedules. This year's top Oscar winner "Spotlight" was released by Open Road, whatever that is. Paramount released "Spotlight" in Germany but apparently didn't find it commercially suitable for the American market, alongside its roster of junk. It did throw us a bone with "Selma", more of a Stanley Kramer type film than Martin Rittsville.
At my junior high school in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, they had the unusual practice of projecting fairly recent feature films during the lunch hour, one reel a day. (A normal length movie would be completed in the five week days, one 20-minute reel at a time.) The charge was 4 cents if you had exact change in pennies, or otherwise a nickel - just like the nickelodeons that started it all 50 years earlier. "No Down Payment" was one of the movies screened.
It's now over 50 years since that time, and the main subject matter of this film is dated, though its overall dramatic thrust has not. For me it represents an interesting incident that made no headlines, and likely has never been reported at all till my current submission to IMDb.
Our series consisted of major studio product, from 20th Century-Fox (it had a hyphen in those days), UA and Paramount, and the movies were just a year or two old at the time of rental by the school. Recall, in those days there was no home video, the TV packages for syndication were not from the majors usually, and the second-run theaters were on the verge of their eventual death spiral (drive-ins continued to prosper, however).
Most of the films we watched were age-appropriate, even though the content was hardly educational - "Enemy from Space" and "Spacemaster X-7" were my favorites from this noontime series. But occasionally a higher profile film was shown, in this case the A-movie with big stars, "No Down Payment".
I never got to see the end of "No Down Payment" back in 1959 when we screened it, because half-way through the film, when Cameron Mitchell's intimations of rape were portrayed on the Silver Screen, the next day no further reels were forthcoming. The school clamped down censorship and we were left hanging (I saw the entire film on TV many years later).
In the '50s movies that were generally released, certainly from the majors, were all G-rated, before the modern rating system was invented in 1968. There were soft- core porn movies that would later play at burlesque houses or so-called Adult cinemas, but basically Family Entertainment prevailed everywhere. So this informal banning of "No Down Payment" stuck with me as a minor milestone in my growing movie buff career, later to turn into a career as a professional film critic (I even served one year as chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle, decades later).
The irony, of course, is that those sci-fi movies of my youth, which were acceptable fluff for our noontime viewing, later morphed into the extremely expensive A movies of recent decades, those tiresome "tent-poles" that keep studios like Paramount and 20th Century Fox afloat (United Artists having become a fictitious studio due to many sales of its assets, with even its "tent-pole" James Bond series now reassigned to the equally extinct MGM label for release by Sony through its hardly resembling the original Columbia banner).
The serious movies like Martin Ritt's "No Down Payment" are an endangered species -try and find an Adult (in the best sense of that misused term) title on Paramount's recent schedules. This year's top Oscar winner "Spotlight" was released by Open Road, whatever that is. Paramount released "Spotlight" in Germany but apparently didn't find it commercially suitable for the American market, alongside its roster of junk. It did throw us a bone with "Selma", more of a Stanley Kramer type film than Martin Rittsville.