Executive Suite (MGM, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next film in TCM’s Stanwyck tribute was Executive Suite (1954), a melodrama about life in a major corporation, the Tredway Furniture Company, and the battle for the succession after its CEO, Avery Bullard, has a heart attack and stroke and drops dead in the street at only 56 years old. A street person pickpockets the dead Bullard’s body and steals his wallet, so his ID is gone and it’s hours before he’s actually identified. During the interregnum, Tredway board member George Nyle Caswell (Louis Calhern) short-sells 3,700 shares of Tredway stock, figuring that once people learn of Bullard’s death the share price will plummet, but his plans are short-circuited by the company’s controller, Loren Phineas Shaw (Fredric March, surprisingly successful as a slimy villain), who releases Tredway’s excellent earnings report along with the news of Bullard’s death. The main intrigue of the film is who will replace Bullard as CEO: Shaw, sales chair Josiah Walter Dudley (Paul Douglas), long-time treasurer Frederick Alderson (Walter Pidgeon) or research chief McDonald Walling (William Holden, top-billed). It’s no particular surprise that Walling eventually wins the title, mainly because he’s the only one with both professional and personal integrity – he’s more or less happily married to Mary (June Allyson) while both Dudley and Caswell have mistresses – and Dudley’s mistress, Eva Bardeman (Shelley Winters, just starting to put on the pounds that eventually turned her from low-budget Universal-International sex symbol to bag lady), is bored out of her wits out of his apparent disinterest in her. During one of their dates from hell she’s desperately hungry while he keeps getting distracted by business issues and refuses to allow her to order anything.

Stanwyck plays Julia Tredway, daughter of the company’s founder, who inherited the bulk of it when he died and installed Bullard as the CEO to salvage the company and keep it in business and in good financial health. Shaw is convinced that he will be the next CEO, and to secure Caswell’s vote he promises to get him 4,000 Tredway shares to make good his loss on the short-sale deal. Julia Tredway makes a big show of burning her stock certificates after she gives Shaw her proxy, only after briefly contemplating suicide (we see her at an umpteenth-floor window about to jump when the clock in Tredway’s skyscraper booms 6 p.m., the time of the board meeting to choose Bullard’s successor) she changes her mind and decides to attend the board meeting after all. Julia rips up the proxy she gave Shaw and instead casts the first vote for Walling as the new CEO after Shaw and Walling have a big argument that sounds contemporary today. Shaw insists that a corporation exists only to pay dividends to its shareholders, while Walling says other factors should be considered, including its overall reputation for creating a quality product, the pride of the workers in what they make, and its ability to keep up with market demands as customers’ tastes change. Walling wins in the movie but Shaw has won in real life, alas.

About two decades after this film, University of Chicago economics professor Milton Friedman published a famous article saying the only reason a corporation exists is to maximize shareholder value, and thinking it has any other purpose is “socialism.” In fact, most modern-day corporate managements have even rejected dividends as a measure of success; instead they focus relentlessly on stock price. Among the most common strategies are borrowing large amounts of money in order to buy back the company’s own stock, thereby saddling it with large amounts of debt for an artificial boost in the stock price. This has led to bizarre phenomena like the use of “market cap” as a measure of how much an enterprise is worth; “market cap” (short for “market capitalization”) merely means multiplying the total number of shares outstanding by the stock price per share. It’s a measurement that rewards stock bubbles and penalizes long-term management, especially since it ignores the price-to-earnings ratios that past generations of investors relied on to measure how valuable a company’s stock was and whether it was overpriced. My husband Charles wondered how many movies besides Executive Suite dealt with the internal politics of a single corporation, including The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956) – which treated a similar situation (but with much more open corruption) as a subject for comedy (and also co-starred Paul Douglas) and Putney Swope (1969), written and directed by Robert Downey, Sr. and an out-and-out satire of capitalism and racism (Putney Swope, the token Black member of the board of an advertising agency, becomes the new CEO because the other board members vote for him only because they assume no one else will). I thought of at least one other: While the City Sleeps (1956), in which the conflict is over who will become editor of a big-city newspaper after the incumbent suddenly dies.