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Mortal flesh in glass towers, the opening charts the demise of a corporate soul with Montgomery's subjective camera (Lady in the Lake). Across a workroom, down the elevator and onto the sidewalk as a stroke cuts him down, the ambulance siren is just one of the New York sounds overheard in an office the next scene. Furniture tycoon then anonymous cadaver, "a one-man company without its one man." The void is to be urgently filled, an emergency board meeting anchors the welter of minidramas. "To plug every profit leak" is the duty of the controller, Fredric March showcases the adding machine's sweaty hands. The designer (William Holden) still believes in the ethics of a sturdy product, his wife (June Allyson) prefers the gravity of a Little League game. The investment banker (Louis Calhern) takes a stocks gamble, the vice-president of sales (Paul Douglas) is carrying on with his secretary (Shelley Winters), Walter Pidgeon's turn as the treasurer is remembered by Preminger in Advise & Consent. "Where's the rest of this séance?" Contemplating a swan dive out the window, thus the company's major stockholder and its founder's troubled daughter (Barbara Stanwyck). Not Minnelli's expressive frenzy in The Bad and the Beautiful but Robert Wise's crisp engineering, as befits a study of the responsibilities of craftsmanship. (The assembly-line commodity goes to pieces during the climax in contrast to the solidity of the tale itself, the reticent artisan's pride sneakily acknowledged.) A choice deep-focus shot has March with his back turned in the foreground talking to a stenographer in the middle ground while Calhern lurks in shadowy profile in the distant background, elsewhere Winters gives Douglas a proper kiss-off: "You go find yourself another aspirin tablet." Stone in Wall Street resumes the quandary, "there are some ways that don't seem right to make money." With Dean Jagger, Nina Foch, Tim Considine, William Phipps, Lucy Knoch, Edgar Stehli, and Virginia Brissac. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |