The whole office is excited for the arrival of the new man. He’s a new addition to the executive suite and has an office carefully designed by the executive secretary. No one knows if he’s a wunderkind, a drone, or a replacement. This is the ’50s, and the office staff is made up of the female secretaries, who only obliquely mention their interests.
But change is coming in the business.
What the business does is largely abstract. It seems they were a manufacturer and then acquired more and more companies. Under the stewardship of Ramsey, the owner’s son, it has grown into a business large enough to take up the top floor of a 40-story skyscraper in Manhattan.
Buy Patterns Blu-rayMost executives are happy to be part of America’s post-war revolution, but Mr. Briggs thinks they are lacking the personal touch. The new man, Staples, doesn’t know he’s been brought in to replace the old man. So, to the annoyance of Ramsey, he does what he can to help him.
Patterns is about the movements of executive business, where the decisions about thousands of workers are dependent on men in offices half a country away. Ramsey is fine with this. If a few men go out of work for a while so twice as many can work next year when conditions are better, everyone wins. Briggs finds this dishonest and abhorrent. He is constantly at odds with Ramsey in meetings.
If this sounds like a lot of men shouting at each other in rooms, it is. And the movie isn’t very movie-ish. Written by Rod Serling based on his earlier teleplay, it feels like a lot more play than film. And, in fact, a lot more teleplay than play, since so much of the early action is insignificant dialogue with important on-screen action. The secretaries have their interplay, as do the individual executives. There are very important business meetings, and the prep for those meetings. This movie is people talking, with the subtext always more important than the text.
And the major subtext is the modern corporation subsuming smaller businesses. Now, Rod Serling was a liberal writer, and one would assume he would present these big businessmen as an unalloyed evil. But he was also an honest story writer and cared about building up both the argument he agreed with and the one he didn’t.
Briggs was being unfairly pushed out by a business he had helped found. But his obsession with holding on wounds his relationship with his son. Ramsey is ruthless, but his ruthlessness might be increasing economic prosperity for everyone around him. The film doesn’t necessarily agree, but it never discounts different actions or points of view to propagandize.
Now, how fun is it to watch? I love black and white movies of old actors arguing, so to me this was a grand time. It had the certain archness that plays do. Rod Serling’s generous screenplay lets every character have their moment of humanity. Even the main villain’s henchman secretary gets a tiny moment of deep disappointment, when her carefully crafted office decor goes unappreciated by the new man.
This is pre-Twilight Zone Serling. Famously, of course, he created that anthology TV show that launched (or, just as often, mined) many dozens of science-fiction and horror concepts. But he felt he had to do that because his preferred medium of social drama was constantly being censored by television. If he wanted to write about discrimination, aliens passed the censors pretty easily.
Patterns does not present some major twist. No aliens sprout out. But it does offer a critical eye at the business boom that represented much of the incredible prosperity that marked post-war America. It’s a critical but not a cynical or biased eye. Through much of his career, Serling was more interested in discussion than telling people what to think. It’s interesting, even in a story far removed from our own world (the crazy ’50s) to see that play out.
Patterns has been released on Blu-ray by Film Masters. There are no extras on the Blu-ray.
