Executive Suite

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Executive Suite a 1954 movie. Directed by Robert Wise with all-star cast.

The story centers on the Treadwell furniture company. The legendary president Avery Bullard drops dead without a successor. The 5 top men of the company are all on the company board; there is also a Wall Street investor and a woman with an emotional breakdown in her past; she is Julia Treadwell (Barbara Stanwyck), the daughter of the company’s founder, and the ex-mistress of the dead president.

So it’s all about: who gets to be president next? The financial guy, the bean-counter Shaw (Fredric March), wants it bad, and he is maneuvering like mad to get it. The others, including perennial #2 man Alderson (Walter Pidgeon), head of Sales Dudley (Paul Douglas), head of Manufacturing Grimm (Dean Jagger), and Don, the young hotshot designer (William Holden), are horrified. Nobody wants the bean-counter, but they can’t agree on who should get it. The only hope is the young furniture designer, but he’s too young, he’s unknown to the bankers, he is more concerned with making furniture.

It all comes down to the meeting of the board (the entire action of the story covers about 29 hours, from Friday afternoon until Saturday 7 p.m., and the clock is a major player – it even announces the cast in a really awkward bit: as the stars’ names appear on screen, they zoom up bigger, and stop at full-size just as the clock of the tower BONGGGGS to count the hours!). Shaw, the bean-counter, seems to have everything locked up when he bribes one man and blackmails another into voting for him, and has Julia’s proxy, moments before Don gets into a vicious fight with Julia, sinking any chance he ever had. Julia in despair walks out the president’s office to jump off the Tower, even as her father had years before – but the great Clock BONGGGS to announce 6 o’clock – the time of the fateful board meeting. This must be the second curtain.

But, the bean-counter doesn’t win on the first vote. I suppose this is the ‘twist’ that takes us into the second half of Act 3. It does bring us 2 scenes that break up the long boardroom scene: out in the anteroom, Don is called by his wife (June Alyson), who confesses that Alderson had called her to tell Don to delay the meeting until Alderson arrives (presumably, and in the event, with Grimm in tow) – but she confesses that she didn’t call, didn’t try to pass on the message, because she doesn’t want Don to be President, fearing that it would take him away from their home too much. The other break in the boardroom scene takes us into the executive washroom where Caswell (Louis Calhern) the Wall Street gambler that Bullard had brought grudgingly onto the board to satisfy the Wall Street crowd, tells Shaw that he is the one who voted ‘Abstain’ in order to pressure Shaw a little more. (When Caswell saw ahead of the news that Bullard was dead, he sold Treadwell stock short in hope that he would make a killing when the stock dropped like a stone come Monday morning; but Shaw released the quarterly earnings Friday night, which were good, and should guarantee that the stock price won’t fall; panicking because he lacks the cash to cover his bet, Caswell wants Shaw to sell him stock to cover his short sale.)

That brings us back into the boardroom. Now all the stars are present, and Shaw is all set to go; only Don begins a speech as a delaying tactic until Alderson and Grimm arrive, but it ends as the chief message of the picture, as the philosophies of Don and Shaw are revealed. Shaw thinks the purpose of the company is to increase the dividend payout to shareholders; his means are first to cut expenses, and second to finagle preferential tax treatment. But Don thinks the purpose of the company is to make furniture! Don goes on to deliver an impassioned speech that reveals his goals, his dreams, his vibrant passion for making good furniture, better, not cheaper and worse, than the company has made before. His speech carries the day, winning over Dudley and Grimm and Don ends up elected unanimously. ‘Together, we can do it,’ was one of his themes, and as soon as the vote is recorded, he goes to shake Shaw’s hand. Shaw offers his congratulations, and Don says ‘thanks’ and calls Shaw by his first name for the first time.

A brief scene out in the anteroom concludes: Julia warns Don’s wife that she will lead a lonely life from now on, but to forgive her husband for loving the company more than his family; and Don and his wife leave.

The good guys have won, but what makes Executive Suite not dated, and especially poignant, is that this is the battle America has been fighting for 60 years – and losing. In real life, the Shaw bean-counters did eventually prevail; American manufacturing, riding high in the 1950s with the delusion that we were ‘best’ (and not taking into account that the industrial base of all our competitors had been destroyed in the War), coasted for 20 years, and then, well, beginning in the 1980s the bean-counters dominated, and have captured the American economy in the years since, producing cheap goods made in factories in third-world countries where governments would look the other way over worker conditions that border on slavery, and pollution that poisons their populace. Here, in this picture, we can see the beginning of the debate, and a clear focus on the path that the country should have taken, but didn’t.

Ernest Lehman adapted the best-selling novel (it was Lehman’s first job, according to commentary by Oliver Stone) and MGM provided props and production design that was, as usual back then, top-notch. The design of the executive suite is according to Stone, typical of the boardrooms and top offices of the time, but it reminded me of a medieval church or monastery. The rich woodwork, low doors, stained-glass windows, with Gothic arches.

The story is amazingly complex. The running time is only 104 minutes, but there are half-a-dozen major characters, each with his own story, and a very complicated backstory that even Stone couldn’t quite grasp. I suspect that only those who’ve read the novel really know all that has been going on. But I won’t bore you with the full rundown.

Wise (and John Houseman, who produced) give us no score music at all. There is only a little source music in the Stork Club as Caswell sits with his expensive mistress and worries that he might be sunk if Bullard turns out not to be dead after all. And then there is the tolling of the bell, that sounds like some Call for the Last Judgment by God Almighty, bringing Bullard to his death, and forbidding Julia from jumping off the balcony even as her father had done in the Depression when the factory closed and the whole town faced dire straits. Most of the principal characters have wives or mistresses, everybody is drawn very well, though quickly and efficiently.

The final boardroom scene is a tour de force. What makes it so amazing is how nobody who isn’t a director will think it’s special in any way. You know how Bob Miller taught us that one of the toughest scenes to direct is the dinner scene where a few people are sitting around a table – how hard it is not to cross the line, to match all the eyelines, not to confuse the audience as to who is talking to whom – well this scene, in its first part, has 6 people sitting around a table; in its second part the stakes go up, and there are 8 people to keep track of. And it goes on for about 20 minutes! Wise worked out the blocking, the shots, everything – he had begun as an editor, after all – and made it work. There’s only one cut that bothers me: when Grimm comes in, he sits opposite Don. Grimm at this point has been wooed by Alderson to support Don’s candidacy, but Grimm, who is Don’s direct boss and jealous of this young hot-shot being hired to teach Grimm his business, is against him, and Alderson has failed to convince him. Grimm sits down, and looks straight at Don, a look that says, ‘No way buster!’ Grimm here looks almost into the camera, just a few degrees off it. In the next shot, a cut to Don looking back at Grimm, taking in this message, Don is decidedly off angle – it’s a bit off being a side profile. The shots don’t cut together at all. Why did Wise do it this way? Was it a mistake? All I can think to justify the shot is that he’s suggesting that Don isn’t so aggressively opposed to Grimm as Grimm is to Don; Don at this point has already learned Grimm ‘can’t be budged’ to support him, and Don probably has only the slightest hope that he might stop Shaw. So his angle tells us that Don is reading Grimm’s message and accepting it without confronting Grimm or asking Grimm to reconsider, or positioning himself as an enemy. (Don, we have to conclude from earlier scenes, will leave the company if Shaw is President, because Shaw will certainly kill Don’s R+D budget to find new means and methods of molding the furniture.)

The nicest part of this double-scene is the place of the dead Bullard. There is one throne-like chair at the head of the boardroom table. Executive Secretary Erica Martin (Nina Foch – did you ever take her class at USC? I didn’t, one of my regrets) in setting up the meeting, by habit puts a pad at Bullard’s place. She has loved this man in a chaste way (well, we have to wonder what the novel might say about the relationship, but in the movie Martin is more like the High Priestess in the Cult of Avery Bullard, and not his mistress – though I believe that had Bullard wanted her in his bed, Erica would have jumped at the chance) and now she moves his chair away from the table. Later when Shaw comes in, he walks right to the head of the table, intending to sit in the throne, and is discomfited to see the place empty, the chair against the window. So he pulls up a chair at the opposite end, the ‘foot’ rather than the ‘head’ of the table.

Throughout the boardroom scene(s) that place is empty, and when Grimm and Alderson arrive, all the places are filled except for that spot. Don in his big passionate speech walks around half the room. He ends up standing in the space where Bullard would have sat, framed against the stained glass windows. That shot (there are actually a couple of them, broken by an insert showing Don walking to the side of the room to pick up a crappy table the company makes, his example of everything the company is doing wrong) tells us that Don is indeed the new Bullard. It’s a great example of how to make a powerful scene:

1. Start with the writing to get it right.
2. Carry on with the performances and casting.
3. Finally in production, the direction just enhances and supports what the writing and performance deliver.

Another very interesting choice was how the opening sequence was presented. How are they going to cast Avery Bullard, an old man, a man of immense charisma and intelligence and drive? Remember they have put the top stars they could get in these subordinate positions. So they need a star who is going to outclass them by that magnitude, and who’s out there? What’s worse is that in Don’s climactic speech he admits that Bullard was slipping in his final years. So not only do we want a star to out-star all the other stars, but we have to ask him to portray a character who is over the hill.

Who’s out there? Well, Clark Gable would be my first choice. We could totally believe him as the driving genius who rescued the company, seduced Barbara Stanwyck, dropped her when he got what he needed, and inspired the worship of Nina Foch, Walter Pidgeon, Bill Holden, and the others. But at this point in his career Gable is still playing leading man opposite Doris Day and other young cuties; he probably wouldn’t do it. There’s also the Psycho problem. Psycho was infamous for killing the biggest name in the cast half way through the picture. How would audiences react to seeing Clark Gable, ‘the King,’ drop dead in the gutter 4 minutes into the picture?

So instead of all this, the opening sequence, in which Bullard says good-bye to the Wall Street broker with whom he’s had lunch, goes down the elevator, into a telegraph office, dashes off a telegram to Erica Martin commanding a special meeting of the Executive Committee that evening, walks out to hail a taxi – and drops dead – is shot all POV, subjective camera. We hear Bullard’s voice and see his hand – that’s all. It makes for a great hook. We want to know who this guy is, what did he look like? Right away the Wall Street guy and Caswell have a talk about Bullard, the way he runs his company. And when the telegram comes into the Tower and Miss Martin informs people of the meeting it sets off more speculation and questions, What’s on the old man’s mind? What is the meeting for?

Over the course of the first half of the picture everybody weighs in on Avery Bullard, pro and con. He achieves his shadowy, almost legendary status by virtue of these talks, as well as from the fact that we have not seen his face, we have only these abstract conversations from which to judge him.

(4 May 2009)