The Solid Gold Cadillac (Columbia, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Born Yesterday Turner Classic Movies showed The Solid Gold Cadillac, which I’ve actually seen many times, starting in the 1960’s when it was one of the films I first caught on NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies. It’s about a company called International Projects, Limited and its founding CEO, Edward L. McKeever (Paul Douglas, Judy Holliday’s stage co-star in Born Yesterday finally getting a chance to act with her on film), who at the start of the movie is about to retire from that gig to take a job as White House consultant to the Defense Department. As a matter of personal integrity, and also at the demand of the Senate committee overseeing his confirmation, McKeever has sold all his International Projects stock – a plot twist that seems unbelievably naïve and quaint in the Trump era, in which Trump evaded concern about his conflicts of interest by placing the Trump Organization in the hands of his adult sons Donald, Jr. and Eric. The company is being taken over by new CEO Jack Blessington (John Williams, best known as the courtly Scotland Yard detective in Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial “M” for Murder) and his assorted gang of crooks: treasurer Clifford Snell (Fred Clark), Warren Gillie (Ralph Dumke), Alfred Metcalfe (Ray Collins, who’d already played the spirit of capitalism run amok as political boss Jim Gettys in Citizen Kane), and Blessington’s totally incompetent brother-in-law Harry Harkness (Hiram Sherman). Only the shareholders’ meeting is broken up by Laura Partridge (Judy Holliday), who owns 10 shares of International Projects she inherited from an aunt for whom she was a caregiver. She immediately protests that the salaries of the board members are too high (girl, you hadn’t seen anything yet given what CEO’s and other top executives are paid now!), and for the next few months she regularly attends board meetings as a whistle-blower.

Exasperated by her presence and worried that she’ll blow up their sweetheart stock-options deal, Blessington hits on the idea of giving Laura Partridge a job in the International Projects building as “Director of Stockholder Relations.” She’s to have a large, fully furnished office (though she brings her own coffeepot so she won’t have to take time away from her duties to get coffee) with her name on the door – “I always wanted one of these merry-go-round chairs!” she exclaims as she sits in the wheeled office chair they’ve given her – and also a secretary, Amelia Shotgraven (Neva Patterson). Unfortunately, Our Heroine is so naïve about the office world that she arrives on her first day, ready and eager to start work. She asks Amelia for the letters from other small International Projects shareholders she’s supposed to answer – and finds out there aren’t any. So she decides to drum up correspondence for herself; she gets a list of all International Projects’ shareholders from Amelia and starts writing them herself. Clifford Snell catches on to what she’s doing when he sees the postage bills from her office. Deciding to get rid of her by sending her on a trip, they supply her with stunning outfits by Jean Louis (he was nominated for 14 Academy Awards, but this was the only time he won) and send her to Washington to lobby their old boss McKeever for government contracts. McKeever catches on immediately and tells her that by sending her as an unregistered lobbyist, the International Projects management has broken the law and could be prosecuted. Laura also tells him the story of the Apex Electric Clock Company, which in Harry Harkness’s one attempt to do something good for International Projects he drove into bankruptcy by slashing prices on International Projects’ own Western Clock products. Only International Projects had bought Apex Clock two years before, and Laura first heard of this through a letter from a woman shareholder whose husband had been driven out of a job by Harry’s antics.

McKeever resigns his government position now that both houses of Congress have passed the appropriations bill he was pushing, and announces his intent to return to International Projects – only to find that, since he is no longer a shareholder, he has no practical way of taking back the company. But a Cinderella solution arrives in the form of mail from hundreds of thousands of individual small shareholders who filled out their proxy forms giving Laura Partridge the right to vote their shares. She goes to the next stockholders’ meeting with instructions to stall while McKeever, Amelia and former office manager Mark Jenkins (Arthur O’Connell), who’ve been together as a couple ever since Laura told Amelia that Mark had a crush on her, and she on him do a tally of the proxies and find they have more than enough to outvote the management. “You are now in control of this company!” McKeever announces to Laura. “In that case, I would like to make a motion,” she says, “The motion is – you’re all fired!” I’ve loved The Solid Gold Cadillac ever since the first time I saw it, and I’ve grown to love it more even though it offers a fairy-tale version of capitalism that has little to do with how the system really works.

Gary Carey, Judy Holliday’s biographer, disliked the movie because the story, originally a play by George S. Kaufman and Howard Teichmann, was originally written for a much older actress: Josephine Hull, who’d been in the original productions of Arsenic and Old Lace and Harvey. He faulted screenwriter Abe Burrows for not giving Laura Partridge the fundamental rewrite she would have needed to be credible played by a much younger actress, but that never bothered me about this film. I found it a sheer delight, with suitably avuncular narration by George Burns and a great ending scene in which, as the gift of International Projects’ small shareholders, Laura Partridge receives the titular solid gold Cadillac – and the film, hitherto in black-and-white, suddenly cuts to glorious Technicolor for the last scene. Around this time Pearl Bailey recorded a novelty song called “The Solid Gold Cadillac,” though it wasn’t related to this film and was instead a hymn to materialism along the lines of Eartha Kitt’s “Santa Baby.” It was made at a session which also featured three songs Bailey sang in her supporting role in the Bob Hope vehicle That Certain Feeling (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/06/that-certain-feeling-hope-enterprises-p.html), “That Certain Feeling,” “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart,” and “Hit the Road to Dreamland.” The session ended up in the hands of Premier Sales, who had a plethora of ultra-low-budget labels and grabbed early recordings by people who later became major stars. I suspect Paramount Pictures made these records to promote That Certain Feeling and that’s how sides by Pearl Bailey, who’d begun her career on major labels (Columbia and later Decca), ended up in Premier’s purview.