Executive Suite (Robert Wise, 1954)

William Holden and June Allyson in Executive Suite

Cast: William Holden, June Allyson, Barbara Stanwyck, Fredric March, Walter Pidgeon, Louis Calhern, Paul Douglas, Shelley Winters, Nina Foch, Dean Jagger, Tim Considine. Screenplay: Ernest Lehman, based on a novel by Cameron Hawley. Cinematography: George J. Folsey. Art direction: Edward C. Carfagno, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Ralph E. Winters.

It has been called "Grand Hotel in the boardroom" more than a few times, because what it has in common with Edmund Goulding's 1932 best picture winner is that it was made by MGM and features an all-star cast. Executive Suite doesn't have much else in common with the earlier film, which was an entertaining stew of intrigue among the glamorous guests of a Berlin hotel. This is a story about power plays in a Pennsylvania furniture manufacturing company, which is about as glamorous as it sounds. The company's president has died without leaving a designated successor. We even see him die -- or rather, we die with him, as the film opens with a subjective camera as Avery Bullard leaves his Manhattan office to take a plane to Pennsylvania for a meeting with his vice-presidents. Through his eyes we see employees greet him as he leaves his office, the elevator doors closing on him, and finally the sidewalk as he collapses from a stroke. A passerby filches the wallet he drops, empties it of cash, and tosses it in a trashcan, thereby postponing the identification of his body. So much for any real action in the movie: The rest is talk, as the company's vice-presidents gather for the meeting and then gradually learn of his death. But one person knew of Bullard's death before them: George Caswell (Louis Calhern), a member of the company's board of directors who from his office window saw Bullard's body taken away by an ambulance and now uses this knowledge to try to pull a fast one with the company's stock. Eventually, there will be a struggle among the vice-presidents to take over Bullard's job as president. It will pit Loren Shaw (Fredric March), the bean-counting company controller, against Don Walling (William Holden), the v.p. for development who is excited about a new manufacturing technique he and his staff have been working on. And that's about as dramatic as it sounds. We all know that Walling will triumph over Shaw, probably because Walling has a nice, faithful wife played by June Allyson and a son who plays Little League baseball, and Shaw doesn't. It looks for a long time like Shaw will win, partly because he is in cahoots with Caswell, promising to make his stock deal work in exchange for his vote. Walling has to win over the other members of the board, who include old-timer Fred Alderson (Walter Pidgeon), who is on his side from the start; Walter Dudley (Paul Douglas), the v.p. for sales who is carrying on an affair with his secretary (Shelley Winters), making him susceptible to blackmail by Shaw; and most crucially of all, the daughter of the company's founder, Julia Tredway (Barbara Stanwyck), who had been involved in a frustrating love affair with Bullard and now threatens to dump her stock in the company. In the end, Walling triumphs with a big speech about the company's ideals and how they're being undermined by Shaw's insistence that the only thing that matters is the stockholders' return on investment, which has led to the construction of cheap and shoddy products. It's a sentimental fable about the "good capitalist" that mercifully doesn't indulge in the red-baiting that might have been expected in a film of the 1950s but ultimately rings false. Ernest Lehman's screenplay does what it can with Cameron Hawley's novel, Robert Wise directs as if it were a better film than it is, and Nina Foch won an Oscar for her role as the company's capable executive secretary, the only woman in the film who isn't completely under the thumb of the men. A trivia note: The narrator and the off-screen voice of Tredway is future NBC newman Chet Huntley.

Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946)

"Alex, will you come in, please. I wish to talk to you." Reinhold Schünzel, Ivan Triesault, and Claude Rains in the final scene of Notorious

T.R. Devlin: Cary Grant
Alicia Huberman: Ingrid Bergman
Alexander Sebastian: Claude Rains
Mme. Sebastian: Leopoldine Konstantin
Paul Prescott: Louis Calhern
Dr. Anderson: Reinhold Schünzel
Eric Mathis: Ivan Triesault
Joseph: Alexis Minotis
Walter Beardsley: Moroni Olsen
Emil Hupka: E.A. Krumschmidt

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Ben Hecht
Cinematography: Ted Tetzlaff
Music: Roy Webb

The critics have canonized Vertigo (1958) as the greatest film of all time, but I don't think it's even Alfred Hitchcock's greatest film. That would have to be Notorious, with Rear Window (1954) close behind, and North by Northwest (1959) and maybe Psycho (1960) edging up in the pack. I have a theory that Hitchcock threw himself so whole-heartedly into Notorious because it was begun under the infernal meddling of David O. Selznick, who was forced to sell the project to RKO in order to devote himself full-time to the impossible task of making Duel in the Sun (1946). Hitchcock had just suffered through making Spellbound (1945), with Selznick and Selznick's shrink, May Romm, breathing down his neck throughout the filming, and he must have felt such a great relief at being freed from Selznick's control that he was determined to make Notorious as good as it could be. He succeeded: It's a tight, witty, suspenseful showcase of everything that Hitchcock could do well. It has two or three of his most impressive directorial touches, specifically the two minute, 40 second single-take kissing scene that follows Devlin and Alicia from room to balcony and back again, and the great crane shot that begins on the balcony of Sebastian's entrance hall and swoops down to the key clutched in Alicia's hand. But technical mastery is only part of the glory of Notorious. It begins, after the sentencing of Alicia's father, with a film noir moment: "bad girl" Alicia entertaining her rather dubious friends as Devlin, whom we see only from behind, watches. And it ends, not with a lovers' clinch, but with the villain being summoned to a doom we know will be very unpleasant. Hitchcock trusts the audience to feel a little bit sorry for Alex Sebastian at that moment when the door shuts him inside with his mother and some very angry Nazis. But the whole film is full of masterly touches, including the characteristic concentration on objects like wine bottles and coffee cups and keys, which play almost as important role in the narrative as the actors. Not that the actors are ignored: Hitchcock was one of the few directors* who saw and exploited the dark side of Cary Grant, who effectively lets his mouth grow tense and his eyes grow cold in his first scenes with bad-girl Ingrid Bergman, so that he can loosen up as they fall in love and then resume the icy tension when Devlin is forced into virtually prostituting Alicia to Sebastian. Hitchcock also invents great business for Leopoldine Konstantin as the sinister Mme. Sebastian, such as the wonderful moment when, awakened by her son with the bad news that Alicia is a spy, she sits up in bed and calmly lights a cigarette before getting down to business. I also love that when Devlin comes to confer with his boss, Prescott, over Alicia's plight, Hitchcock has the usually debonair Louis Calhern stretched out in bed insouciantly eating cheese and crackers. In short, Notorious is a showcase for everything Hitchcock had learned in his first 20 years of moviemaking, as well as a demonstration of the great things to come. When Alicia overhears the argument between Sebastian and his mother, it's a foreshadowing of Marion Crane's hearing the argument between Norman and Mrs. Bates.

*The others would be Howard Hawks in Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and George Cukor, who was the first to glimpse Grant's darkness in Sylvia Scarlett (1935), but I think Hitchcock exploited it best.

Julius Caesar (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1953)

Julius Caesar is the starchiest of Shakespeare's major plays, the one with the least sex, which is why many of us first encounter it in a high school English class. It's a play about soldiers and politicians, professions from which women were (unless they were Queen Elizabeth) excluded in Shakespeare's time, so there are only two female roles: Brutus's wife, Portia, and Caesar's wife, Calpurnia, and both of them are almost walk-ons. (My high school drama teacher wanted to stage Julius Caesar as our class play until he realized that three times as many girls as boys wanted to try out for parts.) So the remarkable thing about MGM's all-star production is that it turned out so well: It's one of the best Hollywood productions of Shakespeare. (Calpurnia and Portia are lavishly cast with Greer Garson and Deborah Kerr, respectively, in the small roles.) That said, it's a shame that not quite enough was done to take the starch out of the play. The casting of Marlon Brando as Mark Antony was a start, but although it's a very good performance, it tends to throw the film out of whack. When it was released, Brando had been stereotyped as a "Method mumbler," for his celebrated performance on stage and screen as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951). Could he rise to the demands of speaking Shakespearean diction? critics burbled. Of course he could, with a little bit of coaching from his distinguished co-star John Gielgud, who plays Cassius, and who was so impressed that he wanted Brando to go to London where he would direct him in Hamlet. That, of course, never took place, more's the pity. But the attention directed at Brando does tend to shift the focus away from the real central character of the play, Brutus, played with exceptional distinction by James Mason. Gielgud is also very good, although it seems to me that in the first part of the film he is a bit too stagy. Mason gives a kind of colloquial spin to his lines -- a sense that he's speaking what Brutus thinks and feels, and not reciting Shakespearean verse. Later in the film, when Brutus and Cassius go to war against Antony, Gielgud has loosened up more. Mankiewicz's adaptation of the play is solid, and he does smart things with camera placement -- putting the camera in the middle of the crowd, for example, when Brutus and Antony give their great speeches after Caesar's (Louis Calhern) assassination. But there is a kind of Hollywood Rome quality to the film -- not surprising, since it was made after the lavish MGM spectacle Quo Vadis (Mervyn LeRoy, 1951) and uses some of the same sets -- that tends toward the stodgy. That's more surprising when you realize that the producer of the film was John Houseman, who had also been a producer of Orson Welles's celebrated 1937 modern-dress Mercury Theatre production of the play, which created a sensation with its evocation of the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany.

The Blot (Lois Weber, 1921)

Louis Calhern and Claire Windsor in The Blot (Lois Weber, 1921)

One of the prolific and once-celebrated Lois Weber's few surviving films, The Blot makes me wish that there were many more. The IMDb credits her with 137 titles, almost all of which seem to be lost. She had a reputation for "message" films, and The Blot is no exception: It was apparently inspired by articles in Literary Digest that denounced the poor payment of teachers and clergymen as a "blot" on our civilization; we even see excerpts from the articles on-screen near the end of the film. As unpromising as that sounds, Weber (who co-wrote the screenplay with Marion Orth) uses humor and deft characterization to make her case. She focuses on Professor Griggs (Philip Hubbard) and his wife (Margaret McWade) and pretty daughter, Amelia (Claire Windsor), who are just barely scraping by on his salary plus some extra money he makes by tutoring and that Amelia brings in from a job at the library. But they also have next-door neighbors, the Olsens, who are prosperous middle-class types from the money he earns making shoes; Mrs. Olsen snubs the Griggses, thinking them stuck-up, but their son, Peter, is smitten with Amelia. So is Phil West (Louis Calhern), one of Prof. Griggs's students. Phil is a rich young playboy whose father is on the board of trustees of the college at which Griggs teaches. Another suitor for Amelia is the Rev. Gates, a young minister. Weber skillfully interplays all of these characters in ways that are sometimes comic, sometimes heart-tugging. The effect is almost novelistic: I kept thinking of Booth Tarkington's  dated but still effective books as I watched it. Moreover, after the story crisis is resolved Weber doesn't give us a pat ending: We still don't know which of the several suitors Amelia will wind up with. An extra delight for me was seeing one of my favorite character actors from the '30s, '40s, and '50s, Calhern, as a romantic leading man. Though it's clear that his magnificent nose is going to doom him to character parts, he makes a credible go of it as a young swain -- he was only 26 at the time.