It tells the story of Evangelos Topouzoglou, a successful Los Angeles-area advertising executive of Greek-American extraction who goes by the professional name "Eddie Anderson” (his second pseudonym).

He is engaged in a torrid affair with his mistress and co-worker Gwen (Faye Dunaway), and is forced to re-evaluate his life and its priorities while dealing with his willful and aging father (Richard Boone).

Wealthy ad man Eddie Anderson attempts suicide by swerving his sportscar underneath a tractor trailer.

Throughout the film, flashbacks—some memories, some hallucinations—reveal his contempt for his life and its "arrangements.” His contentious relationship with his Greek father, Sam Arness—a once-successful importer who despises Eddie for further Anglicizing his name, going to college and refusing to follow the family business—is made worse by Sam's accelerating brain damage from arteriosclerosis.

With the doctor's help, Eddie smuggles Sam out of the hospital to the family home, a huge Victorian mansion on Long Island Sound.

At the commitment hearing, we learn that Eddie subsequently set fire to the family home and we glimpse the alter egos at each other's throats.

However, Brando refused to take the role, stating that he had no interest in making a film so soon after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Production was shut down twice, with Douglas catching Hong Kong Flu three times.

What's worse is that it may be largely incomprehensible, on a simple narrative level, unless one has read Kazan's best-selling, 543-page short story that the director has more or less synopsized in his movie.

"[4] Variety called it "a confused, overly-contrived and overlength film peopled with a set of characters about whom the spectator couldn't care less.

It isn't successful, particularly not on Kazan's terms (he sees it, doubtless, as a bitter sermon on the consequences of selling out).

"[6] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave it 2 stars out of 4, writing that Kazan "fails to give us a clear characterization of Eddie or the people in his life.

"[7] Pauline Kael of The New Yorker wrote, "If one did not know that Kazan is a major figure in films, one would find nothing in the way this movie has been made to suggest it.

The actors have no life of their own as performers, no trace of invention; they're just shouting ciphers, acting out ready-made popular ideas about selling out.