NR | 1h 23m | Drama | 1956
Screenwriter Rod Serling’s boardroom drama is one of the most stirring films on corporate ethics and governance.
Walter Ramsey (Everett Sloane) inherited Ramsey & Company, a Manhattan-based firm from his much-loved businessman father. After his father’s death, through decades of strategic stock transfers and takeovers rather than organic growth, Ramsey has shaped it into an industrial empire. His cutthroat style makes him more feared than respected.
Now, he hopes his young, executive hire Fred Staples (Van Heflin) will accelerate this acquisitive growth, embedding Ramsey’s own brand of ruthlessness into company culture.
Honest, hardworking William Briggs (Ed Begley) has been with the company for 40 years, but Ramsey finds Briggs’s doggedly humane style not only contrarian to his own, but deadwood in a competitive context. Still, he can’t bring himself to fire him. Instead, he hopes Staples’s youthful style will expose Briggs’s relative staleness, nudging him to resign. That backfires.
Newbie Staples turns out to be old-school. He not only likes Briggs, he respects his wisdom, trustworthiness, experience, and compassion that helped build the company. Ramsey repeatedly humiliates Briggs but, feeling cornered at his age, Briggs weathers it. Staples begs him to resign. Why give Ramsey the satisfaction of firing Briggs?
Briggs hangs on, even collaborating with Staples on a crucial business plan. Then Ramsey publicly praises Staples and insults Briggs. It works. The shame and shock kills Briggs. Furious, but facing an unrelenting Ramsey, Staples must choose his next move carefully.
The 6-foot-tall Heflin towers over the diminutive Sloane, mirroring the gap in their moral statures. Begley is superb as the veteran who won’t apologize for his old-world values of honor, character, and loyalty to his hardworking staff.
Serling’s point is that companies need a humane core, especially at the top. He argues against a corporatization that views staff as replaceable cogs in wheels, rather than as people with feelings, families, and frailties. He implies that youth, embodied in Staples, isn’t always an improvement over age, as embodied in Briggs. Equally, the young, like Staples, are as capable of wisdom as veterans, even if short on experience. Big business can be a force for good in the right hands, if it is steered by the right hearts and heads.
To Serling, the problem isn’t capitalism but shaky values. No market is free without responsibility. A genuinely free market, will contain checks on mindless growth and thoughtless consumption. It’ll cherish, not crush, constructive criticism.
The Long View
The long view is attributed to leaders, enabling them to zoom out, view things from a distance, and decide dispassionately. This distance, or height (Ramsey’s executive suite is on the 40th floor), supposedly guarantees the luxury of seeing patterns, desirable and undesirable, that are harder to spot when closer to the ground. The flipside? A more intimate view allows those same leaders to spot nuance, and granularity they’d otherwise miss.Director Fielder Cook opens with a visual commentary on how double-edged this long view is. First, his outdoor long shot is of the soaring Ramsey Building. Next, his indoor long shot is of the sculpted, octagonal-patterned ceiling of its giant ground floor lobby. Outside, you see columns of windows rising up as if to the clouds, but too remotely to allow distinguishing one window from another. Inside, too, you see patterns: pillars, doorways, corridors, and elevators. But at this more intimate distance, you can make out people’s faces, footwear, clothes, bags, and their mood. Cook’s saying that great leaders blend the best of both long and intimate views.
Not that Begley or Staples denounce the primacy Ramsey places on competitiveness, excellence, high standards, or merit. It’s just that, to them, those values and others (team work, generosity, happiness) needn’t be mutually exclusive. Ramsey doesn’t want his business to resemble a soup kitchen or cathedral. Neither do Begley nor Staples. What they won’t concede, however, is their focus on people, whether outside the business or inside. To them, customers or staff are humans, not logistics.
Staples’s secretary (formerly Begley’s) says he’s a fine executive because he admits mistakes, and doesn’t pass the buck. Come lunchtime, he’s fine with postponing work for a while, for himself and his staff. Humane governance can’t be an afterthought. It must be an institution’s very soul.
Through cinematic use of sound, Cook prioritizes traditional values, foregrounding his shot of the Ramsey building with sounds of bustle of people walking and talking and the blare of traffic. Amid all that noise, suddenly, you hear the quaint chime of a tower-clock, ringing out with all the austerity of a church bell.
