ABC Stage 67 “The Trap of Solid Gold” (January 4, 1967)

Rarely have middle-class money woes been dramatized so viscerally as in this adaptation of a John D. MacDonald story that examines a very particular economic vise – the plight of mid-level executives paid handsomely but driven to the brink of financial ruin by the custom of ostentatious “status living” to impress bosses and neighbors.  Cliff Robertson plays Ben Weldon, a Manhattan company man (his exact profession remains unspecified) with a family, a Long Island home, and a real passion for his job: he’s eager to head up “the computer project” at work, and the CEO says that he’s grooming Ben to be “top brass.”  But in the meantime Ben’s going broke on a $23,000 annual salary.  You can practically sense their stomachs clench with anxiety as Cliff Robertson and Dina Merrill (playing Ben’s wife Ginny) trod expertly through the cringe-inducing perils and humiliations that writer Ellen Violett concocts to illustrate the Weldons’ situation.  Ben quits smoking to save pocket change but pretends it’s for his health.  Ginny considers stealing a ten-dollar tip left on a table by an inebriated dining companion.  In a scene that must have inspired a famous passage in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Dustin Hoffman appears as an accountant who breaks down exactly how Ben’s expenses overtake his exorbitant (for 1967) income.  We begin to follow the gains and reversals in the Weldons’ finances as closely as one would the blows in a boxing match, until finally Ben commits the ultimate faux pas of asking for a raise.  All smiles, his superiors dispatch him to manage the regional office in Denver, a $20,000 promotion that dead-ends Ben’s career.  The last lines, spoken on a plane headed west, have a double meaning: their future is here, Ginny exclaims, and now they don’t have to dream any more.