Lansbury’s multidimensional performance in All Fall Down guaranteed her fate in John Frankenheimer’s following picture, The Manchurian Candidate—in which she also played a mother with an unnatural fixation on her son. William Inge adapted James Leo Herlihy’s novel into the space of a somewhat claustrophobic screen—with a strikingly naturalistic excursion to a seedy Key West—in which a small family and a string of lonely women idolize the unusually named Berry-Berry, Warren Beatty’s inscrutable manifestation of lost, violent, rebellious youth. Berry-Berry’s younger brother endearingly struggles to emerge from his own wholesome innocence while watched over by Karl Malden’s well-intentioned, left-leaning, alcoholic father and Angela Lansbury’s manically fluctuating, overbearing mother. When the conservatively eccentric clan falls in love with the unique light of visitor Echo Obrien—played with heartbreaking clarity by Eva Marie Saint—everyone attempts to behave. Not entirely unsympathetic, Lansbury remarkably manages to sustain a simultaneous coldness and warmth toward her troubled, unpredictable family, all of whom fall in and out of the apparent roles Fifties’ society—and its cinema—has prepared for them. – BG