NR | 2 h 33 min | Drama | 1956
Tom Rath (Gregory Peck), wife Betsy (Jennifer Jones), and their three children get by on his barely adequate mid-20th-century salary. Betsy’s hankering after a higher quality of life, and his brief but decisive wartime extramarital affair claw at him, triggering a spiral of regret and recrimination. They also trigger his second thoughts about the personal and professional crossroads he faces in his new public relations job, reporting to UBC Broadcasting’s president, Ralph Hopkins (Frederic March).
Screenwriter-director Nunnally Johnson draws on Sloan Wilson’s novel, which examines the employee and his family on one side and the employer and his organization on the other. At issue in this fraught relationship is whether individual interests of consumers, such as those of a husband and father or a wife and mother, should bow to the collective interests of producers, such as manufacturing or services corporations.
Johnson captures this conflict through a haunting opening-credits sequence. The first frame reveals a man in a dark suit. Successive frames reveal duplicates of the same man but, like an echo, they diminish in size, in sharpness, in stature, in shade until the last image is a muted, minuscule reflection of the first.
Instead of a boring boardroom drama, Johnson’s film uses the family as a microcosm of the pulls and pressures of corporate life. Cinematically, it equates greed for power, money, or fame with extramarital dalliances, and equates mercenary approaches in corporations with transactional attitudes in families.
Three male characters depict the promise, and threat, of corporate life.
Hopkins represents the past; he’s achieved his professional ambitions but at too great a personal cost. Wildly successful in business, his home is in ruins. Estranged from his wife and daughter, he can barely speak to either of them, even when he wants little else.
Rath, shuttling on the train between Westport, Connecticut and Manhattan, New York, symbolizes the present; he’s a man who must choose between succumbing to the corporate rat-race by working punishing hours, or earning just enough to be happy, by prioritizing family.
Engrossing Character Study
Three female characters depict the seductions of corporate life.Betsy Rath represents what’s past, precious, and proximate. Intimate but often ignored, her nagging as a housewife resembles Hopkins’s nagging as a boss; both want, and demand, more from Rath than he thinks necessary.
Maria Montagne (Marisa Pavan), Rath’s dalliance, is a mirage, a kind of false present. His wartime buddy, Sgt. Caesar Gardella (Keenan Winn), waves Maria before Rath as greener pasture to distract him from the bleakness of his PTSD. Rath’s wartime episodes appear in flashbacks, but his ensuing affair in Italy hints that he’ll succumb to the charms of corporate life in America: better pay, better perks, better everything. Likewise, peacetime buddy Bill Hawthorne (Gene Lockhart), flourishes the higher paying UBC job before Rath to distract him from his lower-paying job.
Hopkins’s soon-to-be-married daughter Susan (Gigi Perreau) represents the future. Like an unrealized but contrarian Betsy, she’s already rejecting her father’s obsessions with corporate power and the clout it buys.
Johnson dwells too much on the wartime drama and middling subplots around a contested piece of real estate. Yet, he compensates by unveiling the tortured interiority of his characters, straddling society’s pressure to conform to, rather than resist, herd mentality. Against type, Peck plays a flawed husband, a flailing soldier, and a fledgling corporate hire. With barely any screen time, Ann Harding is riveting as Hopkins’s wife.
Cinematographer Charles G. Clarke points his camera at symbols of the push-and-shove of urban life: a packed train ferrying commuters to work, a couple discussing vital matters while driving because there’s little private time at home, men in suits riding elevators but lost in their thoughts, a secretary hovering near an executive’s frenetic cabin, intruding phone calls and impersonal office decor.
Trivia fans may sense that Bernard Hermann’s score, at its sharpest, predicts his scores years later in “Cape Fear” (1962) and “Cape Fear” (1991). All three films involve troubled couples as a plot device. And, as it happens, all three involve Peck.
Wilson’s novel is partly biographical, granting it a force that a standalone story on the perils of unplanned urbanization-industrialization might lack. He isn’t arguing against the obligations of a paid job. He’s asking for them to submit to a hierarchy of values that gives the family pride of place.
