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)

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955)

Hi Aki,

Today I watched The Invasion of the Body Snatchers a Walter Wanger/Allied Artists sci-fi thriller directed by Don Siegel.

The story has a doctor being called in to the hospital to interview a strange mental case: a respected man from the nearby town of Santa Mira, CA, a doctor himself, who is raving paranoically about ‘them’ and how his whole town was taken over. As the man (Kevin McCarthy) settles down and tells his story, the screen goes blurry and the flashback begins.

It started ‘last Thursday’ when the Dr was called back early from a medical conference he’d been at for a couple of weeks. People were frantically trying to get appointments and would only see him. But when he gets into his office, none of the appointments show up. And there’s the little kid who runs screaming into the road ahead of the Dr’s car, claiming his mother isn’t really his mother. And there’s the middle aged woman who claims her father isn’t her father, even though he looks just like him, sounds just like him, and remembers everything her father knew. She can’t even explain what it is, there’s just ‘something missing.’

The Dr meets another person come back to the town, his old flame Becky (Dana Wynter). She’s just off being divorces, and he’s also divorced, so they feel the old magic and go on a date. But the restaurant is empty. Nobody comes there anymore, the owner tells them.

The Dr gets another frantic call, from a friend and writer. He goes to the writer’s house and finds on the man’s pool table a dead man – what seems to be a dead man. But the face is oddly indistinct, and the hands have no fingerprints. The dead man does, however, happen to exactly match the general physical shape of the writer. And later that night, the dead man begins to wake up – and now he has a cut on his hand just where the writer cut his hand an hour ago.

Soon the cause of all this becomes clear, when the Dr finds in his greenhouse four large seed pods, that burst open, and out of them emerge the slimy, rapidly changing, forms … forms that match with increasing exactitude the Dr, his girlfriend, and the writer and his wife.

It happens when you sleep. When the pod-thing reaches maturity, which it can do inside a day, it can read all your memories while you sleep. When ‘you’ wake up, you are a pod-person too.

The discovery of the threat takes up the first half of the picture. The second half details the frantic efforts of Dr and girlfriend to get out of town to warn the other communities. But the pod people are growing thousands of the pods in greenhouses (it’s a central California farming town) and trucking them out to those other communities.

In a confrontation with some of the pod people, the Dr gets a chance to learn just how it was it happened. The seeds came first from space, and landed in the fields. The pods can take on the exact semblance of whatever life form they choose. They are just like humans, except they have no emotions, no fear, no love, no greed, no ambition, no faith. They all think just alike.

The Dr and Becky manage to run into the hills, chased by the pod people, and they find temporary shelter in an abandoned mine. But Becky sleeps, and when the Dr kisses her, he rises off her body in horror – she’s one of them now. He runs out, chased again, and ends up in the middle of the freeway, desperately trying to get someone to pick him up, to believe him, to take the threat seriously…

Back in the present, he fails to persuade the examining physician, until a report comes in of an accident where giant, weird seed pods fell off a truck. At this the alarmed physician calls the FBI to send out the alert and seal off all roads to Santa Mira.

The film is one of several of the ‘Who Goes There? or, My Neighbors are Aliens!’ films that came out in the 1950s, and is one of the best of them. Supposedly the creators were aiming at the rise of suburbia and the lifelessness of it, or the general rise of more plastic people following the tumultuous years of Depression and war. It also plays into the general fears of Communists and Communist sympathizers that plagued the popular imagination, fanned by zealots of the far Right.

Siegel kept the pace moving along smartly. This is vital for a story which is, at base, preposterous. We have to keep getting new scenes to be distracted from thinking about what we’re watching. The pods themselves are a bit ridiculous, except for the genuinely (to this day) creepy shots of the pods bursting and the bubbling, oozing proto-human shapes sliding wetly out.

The script and first cut of the picture had no frame story, and ended with the shots of Kevin McCarthy as the Dr in close-up looking straight into the camera shouting, ‘You’re next!’ – but when Wanger and the other brass at Allied Artists saw this, they thought it was too bleak and frightening, so they gave Siegel money to shoot the frame, which ends on a more hopeful note. (I wonder if there is any DVD version that gives us that version – it would be a pretty simple matter of skipping the bookend scenes and suppressing the voiceover narration.)

One thing the flashback structure does give us though is a sense of fear and foreboding from the opening. There is a necessary Act 1 of exposition in which everything seems normal on the surface, before the Dr begins to suspect that something is really wrong (with the examination of the unfinished corpse on the writer’s pool table). Without the flashback structure, these scenes would play very tame, even boring; but with the prologue that sense of fear hangs over all this, and we have been assured that something is really wrong; this lets us interpret everything even slightly odd in ways the Dr doesn’t as yet; it also makes us suspect everybody around him, and lets us develop our paranoia over a longer portion of the picture’s running time.

Of course, the closing scene shows us the Dr now relieved, feeling he’s no longer alone. But there is no certainty that the pods can be defeated. There are only the grounds for hope, and no real hope at all.

(Two interesting side notes: Sam Peckinpah was Siegel’s assistant for a few pictures, including this one. Sam claimed to have done a complete rewrite of the script himself, a claim which is widely disputed. In the 1980s Phil Kaufman remade the picture as a comment on the Reagan years and what looked like a return to 1950s life.)

One problem: there really isn’t any difference between the pod people and the regular people. In the 1980s remake (with better actors and more time shooting) Kaufman tried to bring out in performances the lack of emotions when people ‘went pod’ but Siegel really doesn’t get that, and the script doesn’t highlight the difference. Instead, and this is interesting, the difference shows up in the reactions of those not yet converted. They know, and we get the idea just because THEY react that way. In the same vein, what’s so bad about being a pod? The movie doesn’t give a good intellectual answer, but it gives us a good movie answer – because our heroes react in horror to the conversion of those they know, and because the conversion is forced – nobody has a choice.

In this light, it would be an idea to make a My Name is Legion adaptation (the Richard Mathieson novel adapted 3 times as Last Man on Earth and Omega Man in which all the world is vampires, except one man) along the pod people idea: show the doctor faking that he’s a pod person, and so far as he knows everybody else has changed over – but he doesn’t know for sure, so he has to hide himself, who he really is, and yet he’s always tempted – is this woman ‘real’ or that man, that kid?

Here the metaphor would cover things like being gay and trying to pretend you’re straight in a homophobic society, or being an immigrant in a different culture, or being ‘different’ in any way and trying to fit in.

Since this question of ‘fitting in’ is so strong among adolescents, it could be done in a teen-high school setting. The teachers are the main proponents of the pods, they grow them and convert kids; the hero is the last one, so far as he knows, who’s still a ‘real’ kid.

In a weird way, this is the same issue as Kurosawa’s Ikiru.

(27 April 2009)

Bad Day at Black Rock

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Bad Day at Black Rock made in 1955 at MGM and directed by John Sturges. Ice Station Zebra DVD had a trailer for this, so I watched it.

The story is set in 1946 or so. Just after the war ends. In a small town in the desert east of Los Angeles, by the mountains – maybe it’s in Nevada – the train pulls to a stop, and a man in black gets off. Spencer Tracy, a man with one crippled arm. The telegraph operator is shocked: train hasn’t stopped at Black Rock in over four years.

The townsfolk are suspicious of the stranger. Nobody wants to help him or answer any of his questions. Particularly when they learn he’s interested in going out of town to Adobe Flats to see a man named Kumoko.

A man named Smith (Robert Ryan) seems to be running the town in good old western bad man fashion. Tracy manages to get a girl to rent him her jeep, and he drives up to Adobe Flats, where he finds a well, and a burned down farmhouse, and a few wildflowers growing in the dust. He picks a couple and heads back to town.

On the way back he’s run off the road by one of Smith’s goons. In town it gets even worse: even though Tracy now only wants to leave, nobody will let him go. The next train doesn’t come through until tomorrow morning. The local sheriff is no good; the telegraph operator won’t send his telegrams to the police, and the telephone wires out of town are cut. The old doctor offers to lend him his hearse to drive out, but it’s too late, the goons have wrecked the motor. Tracy can’t even walk out; as soon as he leaves the confines of the town he’ll be killed.

After dark, he is promised, he will be murdered.

Finally he turns on one of the goons, and beats him up, though he’s only got one good arm. Tracy is a veteran, and lost the use of the arm in battles in Italy. Now in the hotel lobby he confesses he was all washed up, ready to give up living, when he came to town. He only stopped here because Kumoko’s son saved Tracy’s life in Italy and died in the battle; Tracy wanted to leave the kid’s medal with his father, then go on to Los Angeles and take a ship to someplace where he could just leave his life behind. But now that Smith has threatened his life, he’s come to realize how precious it is, and he wants to fight.

He manages to persuade the young hotel clerk to tell him what happened to Kumoko: just after Pearl Harbor, Smith went to LA to join the army, but was turned down on medical reasons. He came back to Black Rock sore and mad and got drunk with his buddies. Once they were mean drunk, they went up to Kumoko’s ranch. Smith hates Japs anyway, and he hates Kumoko even more, because Kumoko worked hard on the place at Adobe Flats that Smith leased to him, and dug a well and found water. Smith felt cheated and made a fool of, so he took his boys up there and taunted Kumoko. Kumoko locked himself in, and Smith set the place on fire and when Kumoko stumbled out, Smith shot him. They buried him up there where the wildflowers are growing. Tracy figured the wildflowers marked a grave, and guessed it was Kumoko’s.

Tracy manages to get help from the few decent folks left in the town, and he rides out; but he’s betrayed by the girl driving him – she takes him right up to where Smith is waiting. But Smith shoots the girl to do away with one witness, and comes after Tracy. Tracy rigs a molotov cocktail from the jeep and overcomes Smith.

In the morning Tracy drives Smith back to the jail. The sheriff has found his self-respect again. As the train pulls into the station, Tracy prepares to leave; the town’s doctor asks if he won’t leave Kumoko’s kid’s medal for the town, ‘Something for us to build on.’ Tracy agrees, and gets on the train, and rides out. 24 hours have passed since he came to town.

This is another widescreen picture from MGM. Dore Schary got Producer credits, it was shot in Cinemascope, and they built a nice convincing little town out in the scrub desert. All the outdoor shots are nice, they really emphasize the dryness and emptiness, but the skies are blue with white clouds and not blown out; colors are good, exposures are good all around. Sturges gives us a good feeling for being trapped and confined without any walls, just deadly desert all around.

The interiors don’t work quite so well. These were all shot on soundstages back in Culver City, and it shows. We can see out the windows the painted walls posing as the out of doors. The exposures are too dark inside, and through the windows the exposures are not blown out enough. The contrast between the realistic location footage and the interiors is too much for me.

Robert Ryan played this sort of sneering bigot in many films. He’s not given too much to work with here, so he just gives us another excellent portrayal. Nowhere near Ryan’s best, but Ryan was so good, he’s still good. Ernest Borgnine (13 years later to act for Sturges in Zebra) plays one of the goons – the one Tracy beats up. The other head goon is played by Lee Marvin, and Marvin is always a joy to watch. Marvin had a great physical gift; he really looks like a cowpoke here, lazy and coiled like a panther. He was one of the great physical actors. But this is early in his career, when he was playing mostly second-tier goons and hoods. Watching him in these early roles makes me wonder by what miracle he ever got to be a leading man.

For this movie, Sturges was nominated as Best Director at the Oscars. Shocking.

One thing I can see runs between this and Zebra is that Sturges likes longshots – at least in widescreen shooting. In Zebra this is a flaw, because it keeps us out of the emotions, out of the action, and is totally out of place when shooting the cramped confines of a submarine. In Black Rock though, the widescreen shots really help give us the landscape in the exteriors. The interiors are still longshots though, which is too bad. He just doesn’t build up the suspense, the sense of Tracy being trapped, his growing desperation.

(31 March 2009)