A slice of 50's Americana, complete with little league baseball and the world of high finance business.
Intro.
I'm taking a break from my November writing challenge to update this blog. I had watched Executive Suite awhile back, and want to write about while it's still fresh in my mind. November was supposed to be dedicated to Westerns, and it will be, but for now I'm focusing just on what I have time to watch and review. At a modest 104 minutes, the film promised to be tight and easy to follow. Plus it featured June Allyson and William Holden, so of course I had to watch.Overview
Executive Suite focuses on the lives and struggles of half a dozen Board members trying to find a replacement when their chair and CEO of Tredway Corporation, Avery Bullard, drops dead on the sidewalk outside. We get a good sense of characters from the beginning, when each is called in for a six o'clock conference with the CEO, and then one by one as they find out what has happened. George Caswell (Louis Calhern) witnesses the death first and immediately calls his stock broker. He is then at risk to lose his shirt when the quarterly sales reports are released at the same time, which causes the stock to rise, not fall as he had predicted. The woman in love with Avery, Julia Tredway (Barbara Stanwyck), is crushed by his death, even contemplating suicide, despite the fact that he never had time for her when he was alive. Perhaps the most touching response is that of his friend and Vice President of Design and Engineering, McDonald "Don" Walling (William Holden). Don still holds Avery's original ideas - that of expanding and growing, that the company should be dedicated to progress and making furniture in which they could all take pride, not just something fast and cheap to make a quick profit. Unfortunately, the main candidate to take over as CEO, Loren Shaw (Fredric March), is an accountant who is only interested in dollars and cents, not about the workers' integrity. A corporate battle erupts, filled with power plays and unofficial meetings. Finally Don puts his name in for president and comes head to head with Shaw at the final Board meeting.Highlights
I loved how this film opened. The camera shot from Avery's point of view, moving with him, seeing the reaction of people to "his" presence. In this sense, the audience becomes Avery, making him not only a great man of power, but in a sense, the everyman (and woman). It ends, of course, when he dies in the first five minutes, but it's a powerful enough opening and an interesting one. I can't think of any other film which featured that as the opening sequence. It ties in nicely to the narration just before which says that those people way up in the executive suites of all those skyscrapers aren't high and above temptation. The acting was very good in this film. I particularly loved June Allyson, who didn't just fall into the dutiful wife role - she's the one telling her husband Don what to do, even suggesting that he take the position. She's also a great mother, stepping in to play catch with their son when Don has to go off on meetings. I really liked watching their dynamic - Holden and Allyson - as they portrayed a typical American couple of the fifties. But what really impressed me was Barbara Stanwyck, who is her usual dynamic self. I loved seeing her and William Holden reunite in this film, and although their scene alone together is too short, it is still one of the best in the whole picture.
I'm not sure what exactly to write about Executive Suite. It was a well constructed film, pretty easy to follow and an interesting look at the culture's view of business in the 1950s. Holden's characteristic cynicism is rampant throughout the process, that is right up until his final speech about saving the company and saving themselves (against a lovely stained-glass window too - should we call him St. Don?). It's a cry against big business and manufacturing - against disrespecting the factory workers and saving their jobs, their livelihoods, their self-respect. It reminded me in part of some of the 1930s films with respect to the rage against factory labor and bosses not caring about the "little people" who worked behind the scenes. It's important that Don then gets the vote, because he is introduced not in on office suite, but down in the factory, working alongside the others to test a new molding process. Don comes to represent the best intentions of the building and progress boom of the forties and fifties - build it bigger, faster, better. Improve the world through business. But Don is rare amongst his peers, giving us an awful feeling of encroaching corruption. Had this movie been made in in the 1960s or later, I'm sure Don would have become president only to lose his own self-respect, to neglect his family and even worse, to become himself just as awful as the people he once hated. It says a lot about the culture that none of this addressed, that it ends instead on a positive note. I left the movie feeling empty, wondering how long would Don be able to hold onto his ideals of progress. It almost broke my heart that he won; but at the end he is still the family man at heart and I hope he remained that way.
I liked this movie. It's not one of my favorites and I'm not sure I'll watch it again for awhile, but it still poses some interesting questions and I think is a great piece of Hollywood history. I recommend it for history buffs studying the 1950s and those interested in the presentation of business in American film.
P.S. I should mention that the film lost me about halfway through with a lot of complications around Calhoun's character's work with the stock market. He arranged for a short sell, but didn't have the stock so he was going to go broke when the stock price rose. Anyway, I used to work for a financial publisher, and I had some trouble following at first. Then I realized we weren't really supposed to understand - these were the tycoons talking, those who didn't care about the common people on the ground floor or in the audience. They literally don't "speak our language". It's a brilliant contrast to straight-shooting Holden.
