Cast: Don Murray, E. G. Marshall, Jack Warden, Patricia Smith, Larry Blyden, Philip Abbott, Carolyn Jones, Nancy Marchand
Charlie Samson (Murray) is a young married man living in 1950’s New York. He struggles to excel in his daytime job while attending college at night. Charlie and his newly-pregnant wife Helen (Smith) have issues that they are working to resolve. Helen’s sister-in-law Julie (Marchand) adds to the couple’s tensions with her concerns about her own straying husband. A bachelor party for groom-to-be Arnold (Abbott) has an emotional effect on the participants. The evening starts at a restaurant with a dinner party and gifts for the groom and segues to visits to bars and nightclubs. During a nightlong celebration punctuated by subway rides each of the men reveals a problem he struggles to resolve. Arnold is nervous and apprehensive about his imminent marriage. His friends include Charlie, who does not know how he can afford the coming baby, an older asthmatic man (Marshall) who worries about dying if he does not move to a drier climate, a confirmed bachelor (Warden), and homebound Kenneth (Blyden). Carolyn Jones plays a confused existentialist seductress they meet along the way. Exposures to temptations and to vignettes of other people’s problems make Charlie confront his own self-doubt and test his commitment to his own marriage. Some scenes were shot on location at New York’s Greenwich Village. Screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky.
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