The screenplay was adapted by playwright William Inge and the film starred Eva Marie Saint and Warren Beatty.

Together with her performance in Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Angela Lansbury (who played a destructively manipulative mother in both films) won the year's National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Berry-Berry is always on the road far from home, rarely seen by his drunken father Ralph, his mother Annabel, or his sixteen-year-old brother Clinton.

But the Willarts are awakened later by a call from a state trooper, reporting that Echo had driven off the road and been killed in the ensuing crash.

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times panned the film, describing it as "distasteful and full of cheap situations and dialogue".

He found the movie's premise—that "everyone in the story is madly in love with a disgusting young man who is virtually a cretin"—fatally flawed.

He learns the truth, squares his shoulders, and walks out into the bright sunlight, as Alex North's music rises and swells in victory.

[5] Warner Home Video released the film on Region 1 DVD as part of its "Archive Collection" on June 22, 2009.