The High Cost of Loving (1958)

(On Cable TV, October 2022) The very distinctive Jose Ferrer directs and stars in 1950s American Dream satire The High Cost of Loving, another film that proves that the people of the semi-mythical 1950s were not blind to the flaws of the emerging post-WW2 social order. Here, Ferrer plays an upwardly mobile executive who experiences turmoil at work even as his wife announces that she’s pregnant. There’s a little bit of farce, as the protagonist convinces himself that the company is about to fire him, decides to go out with a flamboyant gesture… then has to take it back once it turns out he’s instead being groomed for a significant promotion. Ferrer is an intriguing director—the first few minutes of the film are entirely without dialogue, as a married couple lovingly goes through their familiar morning routine without even having to talk. Gena Rowlands has her screen debut here in the role of the protagonist’s wife. The High Cost of Loving is not a particularly big movie, but I’m not sure you could call it unambitious: in its own quiet way, it highlights the building neuroses and anxieties of the average suburban husband/executive quite efficiently, and it clearly joins other 1950s satires that remind twenty-first century audiences that the decade wasn’t nearly as docile and unquestioning as we now think it was.