In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based entirely on where my interests lead me.
Patterns is included in the Criterion box set The Golden Age of Television. For more about that series and the context in which the programs in it were created, see this review.
In the 1950s, the United States was enjoying unprecedented prosperity with rapid economic growth and rising living standards. Not everyone enjoyed the benefits equally, of course, but the sheer range of consumer products affordable to the average American, as contrasted with what was available to people living in the Soviet Union and countries controlled by it, became one of the many factors used to support the argument that capitalism is good for everyone.
One of the rare mainstream voices challenging this assumption was that of Rod Serling, who in television plays like Patterns and episodes of The Twilight Zone like “A Stop at Willoughby” and “Walking Distance” questions whether prosperity is everything it’s cracked up to be (although both TZ episodes also caution against seeking refuge in a romanticized past). Given the political climate of the day, it is remarkable how well he succeeded in smuggling criticism of capitalism onto commercial television programming (particularly in an era where programs were broadcast nationally and producers had to avoid antagonizing any segment of the country while also depending entirely on advertising for revenue) while his attempts to address topics like racism were censored.
Serling got away with his criticisms by couching them in personal terms, allowing audiences to feel sympathy for individuals harmed by relentless capitalism without drawing the conclusion that it was the system, rather than individual people, which needed to change. The sympathetic victim at the heart of Patterns is Andy Sloane (Ed Begley), a longtime executive at Ramsie & Company who is now old and sick and generally not doing well. Worse (in career terms), he has values beyond maximizing profits and thinks the company should consider how their actions affect others (e.g., shutting down a plant to save money means many people will lose their livelihoods) before making strategic decisions.
None of this is acceptable to his boss, Mr. Ramsie himself, (Everett Sloane), who came up the hard way and has no tolerance for weakness. Ramsie’s drive to succeed is matched by his penchant for cruelty, as he spurns the face-saving solution of allowing Sloane to ease his way into retirement or take a less significant role within the company. No, Ramsie must hound Sloane until he quits or otherwise exits the firm (hint hint), which you can take as either the expression of a single antisocial character or as a laying-bare of one of the truths of unchecked capitalism.
Enter recent executive hire Fred Staples (Richard Kiley) a handsome and well-meaning sort of fellow with a full head of hair, a firm handshake, and a charming wife (Fran Staples) whose only job is tending to him and his career. He’s the face of the future and doesn’t realize part of his job is to drive out the old, in this case to force Sloane to resign (as a senior secretary points out in an early scene, the company never adds a new vice president without getting rid of an old one). We know from the start who Ramsie and Sloane are, but we don’t know what Staples will become, making him the most interesting character in the story.
One of the interesting points about Patterns is how well it captures the two cultures of office life in the 1950s. Officially, the men are in charge of everything and the executive meetings are so aggressively white and male that they’re almost comic. The women who work in the office (mainly as secretaries since the word processor lies decades in the future) are like servants to the men, an inferior class who nonetheless knows a lot about what goes on among their rulers. There’s a power structure among the women as certainly as there is among the men, and for all the chidings they receive about gossip they know how to get information and have a pretty good idea what is going on. They also know how to drop strategic bits of information that the men would prefer to leave unmentioned and thus can wield influence indirectly, as have generations of women before them. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 495
Technical details: 52 min.; B&W; screen ratio 1.33:1; English.
Edition reviewed: DVD (3 discs)
Extras: introduction hosted by Keenan Wynn for the 1981 PBS television series The Golden Age of Television, featuring interviews with Richard Kiley and Fielder Cook. The Criterion web site mentions a booklet including an essay by Ron Simon and liner notes for each program but it was missing from the library copy I reviewed.
Fun Fact: Patterns proved so popular that it became the first live drama to be broadcast twice, in January and February 1955, both times being performed live. It was also made into a 1956 film starring many of the same actors, but that version bombed at the box office, perhaps because people had already had two chances to see it for free.
Parting Thought: There’s a truism in the writing world that while you can get an audience to care about the misfortune of one character, they quickly lose interest as the number increases. That means that Steiger’s choice to personalize the depredations of capitalism may have been good strategy in communications terms as well as a clever way to evade censorship. Are there any successful examples from within popular entertainment that took the opposite approach?
