I WATCHED AN OLD MOVIE CALLED Executive Suite the other night and went on a full-bore nostalgia trip. The
story is about a group of executives as they duke-it-out for control of a large, American corporation, following the sudden death
of the company’s CEO. Avery Bullard—there’s a man’s name for you!—dies of a
heart attack while away on business in New York. His is a character whose face
we don’t see on screen. The opening scene is viewed through his eyes--like a
first-person shooter, minus the guns and body count--as he completes a meeting
on Wall Street, buys a newspaper, and then collapses to the pavement, dead. We
learn he was a larger-than-life character, a captain of industry, beloved by
employees, respected by his competitors, admired by all. Under his leadership,
he turned around the fortunes of the family-owned Tredway Corporation, making
it into the third largest furniture manufacturer in the United States. He bestrode
the earth with great strides, and all who followed him did prosper.
Yet, after years of struggle and
growth, cracks are seen in the façade. All is not well at Tredway.
Through dialogue between various characters we learn there are forces afoot that
threaten to change the character and direction of the company, to make it into something
that would have made Avery Bullard ashamed. And these forces were loosed, in no
small part, by the great man himself, who in recent years had come to tack his
boat more often in the winds of a changing corporate sea, whose airs filled
the sails of the great man’s ship and took him further and further away from his former course. Nautical
imagery aside, the story is about the scheming of several Tredway
executives as each attempts to garner enough votes before the hastily
called board meeting to be named president.
Based on a 1954 novel by the same name, the movie could
easily have been staged as a play, because much of the action takes
place in the executive offices on the top floor of the company headquarters. By the way, the emperor Nero
would have been jealous of that pad! Talk about plush! It had heavy wood-paneled
walls, marbled floors, fireplaces, a gothic-styled entrance way you could play
basketball in and even a bell tower that chimed on the hour! And the bells are
heard throughout the movie. In the opening scenes we hear them chiming. At
first, it is a welcoming sound, a sound of gathering and community. After Bullard’s
death they sound ominous, discordant and funereal. As the various
factions battle, the ringing becomes strident, oppressive, foretelling of doom.
At one point, board member George Caswell—a low-life Wall Street wolf whose goal
is to capitalize, through insider trading, on Bullard’s death—claps his hands
to his ears as the bells sound out the hour. (They are the sound of Ballard's ghost angrily denouncing Caswell's duplicity.) But our hero, Don Walling, scarcely notices them. For him, they are the sound
of the beating heart of his company. They sound for workers and executives alike,
for their community and their workday lives. They ring out for the dead, and they will announce the
arrival of new king. (I want a bell tower, too, but my landlord won't go for it!)
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| William Holden as Don Walling |
Walling is the executive in charge of
production who seeks to innovate and invigorate the company, and he is seen as
the man of the future, the type of CEO that should be in charge. His protagonist
is the oily bean-counter, Loren Shaw. (“Shaw”—everybody calls him “Shaw.” They
say his name like they had something stuck in their throat.) He is like a spider who waits in his lair to trap others in his web. Yet, he perspires heavily, and compulsively washes his hands--almost as often as Pontius Pilate washes his hands of the blood of Christ--suggesting Shaw may have a conscience, after all. Nevertheless, he carries on with his plotting, and his behind-the-scenes manipulations and
back-stabbing would give Machiavelli a run for his money! Will this technocrat
and nickel-and-dimer win out, or will the soul of the company be kept alive by
Walling. Will quality and honest brokerage win the day, or will Shaw’s flow
charts and profit-margin mentality change Tredway into a place where the
bottom line is put on the top shelf? Will the company be a place where innovative,
quality furniture is made or will it become another Ikea? (I know, I know! A lot of people love
Ikea. But, seriously—why?)
So the gist of the story is whether
you can stay true to yourself, keep your core values, and run a giant company ethically.
By the movie’s end, Walling, played by the affable, yet steely-eyed, William
Holden, wins the day and accepts the torch handed down by Bullard’s ghost. The
bells ring out. (That Bullard must have had enormous
brass clappers!) The King is dead. Long live the king! The End. Fade to black. It was David versus Goliath, George
Bailey versus Mr. Potter, Gary Cooper at High
Noon. You get the picture. And in glorious
black and white! No wonder I had a nostalgia high zapping me harder than the sugar
rush I get from a plateful of Grandma’s homemade fudge!
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| Fredric March as "Shaw" |
Wow! How times have changed. And it’s too easy; it’s like shooting ducks—or executives—in a barrel! In the real world now, fast-forward
twenty years and then another thirty and who's won the battle? Not Don Walling*. His
factories are all closed. All his workers are laid off or moved, or dead. Company towns like Millburugh, with their once bustling factories and plants, are now ghost-towns and places that have seen their heydays pass them by long ago. Production has moved
to China or Vietnam, or places where rainforests are razed to the ground to
make shitty, mass-produced furniture for Walmart. It all went pear-shaped, and
then the bottom fell out. And so the “Shaws” of the world have won, after all: Sales margins
and stock options, market share and shareholder dividends are the new mantras. It's quantity versus quality; global versus community; profit versus pride.
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| The Board Room |
And for
some reason, that really annoying
song, “It’s a Small World” comes to mind. Wik
says the tune is played as part of “a water-based dark ride located in the Fantasy Land area at the various Walt Disney Parks,” and
that it is the most “publically played” song of all time. (Egad! If you hear the thing
just once it sticks in your brain like a trough of cold treacle!) And the idea of
being forced to take a “dark ride” through a “Fantasy Land” while listening to how small everything has become over and over, and bloody over again, somehow seems
an appropriate rite of passage for our times. And if Don Walling was around (and not under an
overpass drinking hooch) he might agree with me.
Thus, neoliberal economic policies
and rampant capitalism over the past forty years have taken us all for a ride, gutting manufacturing
infrastructure and turning former makers of things into consumers of things (all atop a mountain of debt that can never be repaid.) Where will it end, and
when, are questions I’ll leave for another day.
Finally, in the movie's climactic scene, Don
Walling makes an impassioned plea to the board of directors, sharing his vision
for the company:
“The force behind a great company has to be more
than the pride of one man; it has to be the pride of thousands. You can't make
men work for money alone - you starve their souls when you try it, and you can
starve a company to death the same way.”
Isn’t
he just adorable?
Cheers
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| "...peg A2 into hole B3? WTF!?!" |
*I was
looking to see if there was any of the uber-mensch in Walling—this movie reminded about another movie based on a book by the same name, The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, and it's protagonist, the brilliant architect Howard Roark—but I found Holden’s character to
have a greater need to promote the collective well-being of his society versus the glacial individualism of someone like Roark (or for that matter, the highly competent and gifted, yet self-serving and avaricious "Shaw".)
However, there was matter of the ‘vestal virgin’ figure of Bullard’s secretary, Miss Martin, that reminded me about how high the glass ceiling was back then when there were so many Randian
swinging dicks coming into their own.
Executive Suite, 1954, directed by Robert Wise. Staring William Holden, June Allyson,
Barbara Stanwyck, Fredric March and Walter Pidgeon, Shelley Winters)
