Streaming Saturdays! A Blacklisted Writer Skewers Suburbia with NO DOWN PAYMENT

sistercelluloid ♦ May 15, 2026 ♦ Leave a comment

Welcome to another edition of STREAMING SATURDAYS, where we bring you free, fabulous films to watch right here, embedded at the bottom of the post!

This week’s movie is brought to you by… David Bowie. In 1967, responding to one of his first fan letters from the U.S., he wrote, “I hope one day to get to America. My manager tells me lots about it as he has been there many times with other acts he manages. I was watching an old film on TV the other night called No Down Payment, a great film, but rather depressing if it is a true reflection of The American Way Of Life.”

Indeed. The same year Peyton Place was stripping the gloss off suburbia, No Down Payment was stripping the gloss off Peyton Place. It’s a much grittier take on the kind of Sears-portrait lifestyle sold to millions of Americans in the years after the war.

Directed by Martin Ritt, No Down Payment peeks into the lives of four young families who bought into the dream of Sunset Hills, a subdivision of trim, tidy homes tucked into the flats of Southern California. The newest couple, David and Jean Martin (Jeffrey Hunter and Patricia Owens), are welcomed with a boozy barbecue by Betty and Herman Kreitzer (Barbara Rush and Pat Hingle), Troy and Leola Boone (Cameron Mitchell and Joanne Woodward), and Jerry and Isabelle Flagg (Tony Randall and Sheree North).

From there, it’s mostly a downhill slide for everyone. Turns out the Flaggs are deep in debt, as Jerry’s drinking has led him to slip up on the job; Jean is pressuring David, an electrical engineer, to take a more lucrative sales gig to cover their mounting bills and massive mortgage; and Herman is struggling with his conscience over his reluctance to promote his auper-qualified Japanese assistant, who’s counting on his boss to do the right thing. The Boones, meanwhile, are just an all-around mess: he’s a preening lech and a gun nut, and she’s desperately draping herself over anyone who seems remotely sympathetic. (She also wants to bring a baby into this train wreck.)

The cast is superb—Joanne Woodward earned a BAFTA nod and has called this her favorite of all the films she worked on—and Tony Randall and Sheree North are especially heartbreaking. If you’ve only seen Tony in comedies, he’ll amaze you here, especially since he’s still essentially the same affable guy, but achingly broken. (Years later, in “Hangover,” an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he essentially revives this character with tragic results.)

It’s somehow perfect that this scathing slice of suburban life was brought to the screen by a blacklisted writer: Ritt hated the original draft submitted by Philip Yordan, who’d adapted it from a paperback novel he’d commissioned from John McPartland, so Ben Maddow, who by then had been put out of work by the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC), did most of the heavy lifting on the script. (Ironically, the following year, Maddow appeared before HUAC and sang like Caruso.)

Oh and if you’re wondering why a film with a stellar cast and director has flown a bit under the radar, it’s because then-Fox studio head Spyros Skouras branded it leftist propaganda and all but killed it.

But now it’s here, and it’s yours.

STREAMING SATURDAYS is a semi-regular feature on Sister Celluloid. You can catch up on movies you may have missed by clicking here! And why not bookmark the page to make sure you never miss another?