Kicking off with the sudden death of a
furniture company President, Robert Wise’s Executive Suite then follows the machinations to secure a majority of the seven
board votes that will decide his successor. Five of the seven voters have a
declared or potential interest in the position, with the main dynamic pitting an
overriding focus on maintaining the bottom line against a more organic,
forward-looking approach based on innovation and investment. No doubt a remake
would feel compelled to focus on a more glamorous sector than the furniture
industry (but then, Wise’s film derives from the heart of the materialist
Eisenhower-era boom); such a remake would surely spend more time too on environmental
sustainability, which no one thought they needed to worry about back in those
fortunate days (for an interesting modern-day reference point, Danone kicked
out its CEO in 2021 for allegedly focusing too much on an “activist agenda”
versus the bottom line). Some aspects of the film remain interesting from a
technical perspective: the one unscrupulous director (Louis Calhern) who sold
the stock short to capitalize on an expected decline, and sees it going against
him; the machinations of the vote itself. But it’s disappointing that in the
end it comes down to typical movie speechifying by the youngest and most
visionary of the group (William Holden), the opposition crumbling with
improbable speed, and that other than a clunky initial sequence shot from the
perspective of the doomed President, Wise never achieves anything very
cinematically interesting. The cast also includes Fredric March as the very
epitome of the blinkered numbers man (another character bitingly snipes at his
"night school CPA") and Barbara Stanwyck, the only woman on the board,
but only as a result of family inheritance rather than business acumen (a
gender bias of its time, not yet fully rectified in our own).
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