The People Next Door (CBS, Titus Productions, 1968)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, July 9) I ran my husband Charles an unexpectedly good movie from the archives of CBS: The People Next Door (1968), the opening episode of the second season of the network’s attempt to revive the classic Playhouse 90 anthology series from the 1950’s. I ran it from YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZMq4Y2QeJM because I’m supposed to be doing a Fanfare music review of a CD composed of three scores Jerry Goldsmith composed for TV-movies between 1968 and 1972: The People Next Door, Pursuit, and Crawlspace (a horror tale of a suburban couple who move into a house they’ve bought, find a young boy living under it in the crawlspace, and adopt him, only to find they’ve got a monster on their hands). Charles and I had watched Pursuit the previous night and found it a rather dull wanna-be “thriller” that had very little action (and very little of Goldsmith’s music). The People Next Door was another matter altogether: a surprisingly good, finely honed story about the conflicts between middle-aged suburban parents Arthur and Gerrie Mason (Lloyd Bridges and Kim Hunter) and their teenage children Artie (Peter Galman) and Maxie (Deborah Winters). There were a lot of these kinds of stories being made in the late 1960’s, but this one is unusual for the moral complexity director David Greene and writer J. P. Miller brought to it. The crisis begins when Arthur and Gerrie invite their “people next door” neighbors David and Tina Hoffman (Fritz Weaver and Phyllis Newman) to dinner, only Artie refuses to leave his room to join the dinner party because, as he bluntly tells his father, he can’t stand the Hoffmans. Gerrie finds a hand-rolled marijuana cigarette in the closet and immediately she and Arthur both assume it’s Artie’s. Artie says drugs are “not my scene anymore” (indicating that he, like me, tried them briefly and decided they didn’t work for him; my two teenage attempts to smoke pot both left me violently nauseous, and I assume that’s a physiological reaction on my part because to this day being around other people smoking marijuana makes me queasy). Instead he’s going to stay in his bedroom practicing his guitar, though eventually he comes down for dinner because he’s hungry.

During the party the Masons hear whimpers from Maxie’s room, and Artie immediately realizes that Maxie is in the middle of a bad LSD trip and starts trying to talk her down from it. Unfortunately, Artie and his dad get into a huge argument that results in Arthur literally throwing his son out of his house and telling him never to come back. Their fight is over Arthur’s assumption that his son turned his daughter on to drugs, which he didn’t. Symbolically, Arthur’s and Artie’s confrontation leads to Arthur breaking the neck of his son’s guitar, which Artie leaves behind, though we later see him rehearsing with his folk-rock ensemble even though he doesn’t have a guitar anymore and therefore can only sing. Gerrie gives Maxie two sleeping pills in hopes that will get her to calm down and get some sleep, but she rather nervously awakes in the early morning hours. In the next few days, Arthur and Gerrie have a series of confrontations with their daughter in which she tells them they’re both hypocrites and idiots. Among other things, Maxie tells her parents that her bad trip wasn’t the first time she’d dropped acid, and also that she’s been sexually active with at least two male partners even though she’s only 16. She points out that Arthur and Gerrie had sex with each other before they were married – something she knows because once she had a sleepover with a female friend whose father was a doctor, and she brought along a stethoscope so they could eavesdrop on Maxie’s parents’ bedroom conversations. She also accuses Arthur of having sexual affairs with other women on nights he’s supposedly working late. This has a galvanic effect on Gerrie, who’d long suspected her husband of extra-relational activity but to have it confirmed so bluntly, and by their own daughter no less, turns her attitude towards her husband around so dramatically she isn’t sure she still wants to sleep with him.

At Gerrie’s insistence, Arthur reluctantly agrees to take Maxie to a therapist, Dr. Margolin (a young Robert Duvall, three years before his role as the consigliere in The Godfather made him a star), for both family and group sessions, but Maxie’s continued hostility both to her parents and the entire idea of group therapy ensures that the sessions aren’t beneficial. At one point, Maxie runs off to the East Village in New York City and, with Artie’s reluctant help, they find her in a squalid apartment in bed with her boyfriend. Later, in a quite startling sequence even today, Maxie secretly takes a dose of the LSD-like chemical STP (an acronym for “Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace” even though the drug offers none of those things) and dashes out of the Mason home totally naked. (I’m not sure whether Deborah Winters was wearing a body stocking or was actually nude, but despite – or maybe because of – David Greene and the uncredited cinematographer’s careful choices of camera angles, the scene still shocks today, I can’t help but wonder what 1968 TV audiences thought of it.) This time she ends up in a mental institution run by Dr. Salazar (Nehemiah Persoff), who offers a grim prognosis for Maxie. Since Arthur and Gerrie don’t have the $25,000 to $40,000 (in 1968 dollars; $232,000 to $371,000 today) to pay for a high-end rehab program for their daughter, they’re stuck with leaving her in the public hospital indefinitely. Dr. Salazar bluntly tells them she might have to be institutionalized for the rest of her life. Meanwhile, David and Tina Hoffman discover that their model son Sandy (Don Scardino), who’s planning to attend law school after he finishes high school and college, is [spoiler alert!] a drug dealer. He conceals his inventory in the trunk of his red Sunbeam sports car, which he keeps in his parents’ garage and reacts angrily when his mom wants to borrow the keys. David is so upset by this revelation he literally calls the police and turns his son in, but Sandy is convinced that the charges won’t stick. They don’t; a judge dismisses the case based on illegally seized evidence, and the police drive Sandy back to his home. Having realized that it was Sandy who provided Maxie with drugs, the moment he gets out of the cop car Arthur attacks him physically, and Frank immediately tells the police to arrest Arthur for assault. The End.

The People Next Door is an absolutely gripping tale that held my interest start-to-finish, and one of the things I liked about it was it didn’t moralize. Most of the teenager-on-drugs tales that made it onto television in 1968 were blatantly propagandistic just-say-no stories. This one wasn’t; we get a good idea of both why the parents are so shocked that their daughter turned to drugs and why she did. Also, though he doesn’t stress it, J. P. Miller’s script quietly makes the point that the parents are just as dependent on various mind-altering substances as their kids. Not only do the elder Masons and Hoffmans drink themselves into alcoholic stupors and smoke incessantly (when Maxie asks her dad for a hit on his cigarette, even though it’s only tobacco, Gerrie is shocked and tells her, “I didn’t know you smoked”), but David admits that the reason his wife Tina has such trouble sleeping is she’s taking amphetamines to lose weight, and they keep her awake so late she needs either alcohol, sleeping pills, or both to get any rest. One of the most interesting aspects of The People Next Door is that Artie, the one truly sympathetic character – the one who tries hardest to be the voice of reason amidst all the insanity going on around him – is also the one that gets treated the worst. At one point after she’s institutionalized, Maxie insists that Artie be allowed to visit her because she needs someone of her own generation whom she knows she can trust. Peter Galman’s performance as Artie is quiet but intense, like the character. As for Maxie, Deborah Winters delivers a portrayal that convinces us her life is literally on the edge, and the two sequences in which she enacts bad trips are heart-rending and decidedly authentic-looking. (I’ve never known anyone who, at least to my knowledge, has taken LSD or STP, but I’ve known enough meth heads to know what a bad trip on that substance looks like – and Miller’s script attributes Maxie’s bad LSD trip to her dose having been laced with “speed.”) The People Next Door also is quite daring for its open ending; unlike the modern-day Lifetime movies that are the descendants of the made-for-TV films of this era, it doesn’t neatly wrap up all the issues in its standard running time. Instead it leaves us grieving for all the characters, their fates, and in particular the messes they’ve made of their own and each others’ lives by keeping secrets and telling each other lies.

The People Next Door was remade as a feature film in 1970, just two years after this version aired, and it carried over David Greene as director (though he was so disgusted by studio interference he tried to have his name taken off the feature version) and J. P. Miller as writer. Fortunately, Deborah Winters as Maxie remained from the original cast, as did Don Scardino as Sandy and Nehemiah Persoff as Dr. Salazar. But all the other actors were different: Eli Wallach and Julie Harris as the Mason parents, Stephen McHattie (who would later star in a TV-movie biopic of James Dean) as Artie, and Hal Holbrook and Cloris Leachman as the elder Hoffmans. Also pop-jazz arranger Don Sebesky replaced Jerry Goldsmith as composer, though the original 1968 TV version had given Goldsmith major opportunities that he didn’t get from the rather dreary Pursuit four years later. In particular, Goldsmith got to write music in different styles for the characters, with Greene using Woody Allen’s trick from a few years later of illustrating the gaps between the characters by their tastes in music. The People Next Door opens with ragtime piano being played on the Masons’ family instrument, then segues to Artie’s quiet acoustic-guitar picking. Even before we’ve heard a word of dialogue, this illustrates the “generation gap” that drives the story. There’s even a sequence in which the Masons and the Hoffmans try to show they’re “with it” by playing a Beatles song in ragtime style – but the song is “She Loves You,” while we’ve seen posters of the Beatles from the Sgt. Pepper’s era in the kids’ bedrooms that show that Artie and Maxie have moved on from what John Lennon contemptuously described in retrospect as the “she loves you, you love her, we all love each other” banality of the Beatles’ early music.