Business Films

James Bond, corporate hero? Sean Connery and Lois Maxwell.

 

MANAGEMENT AND THE MOVIES

By TOM SOTER

from MANAGEMENT REVIEW, 1996

The Chase Manhattan Bank, eliminating 16 percent of its jobs over three years, claims it is replacing a “paternalistic organization” with a company that will “assist the employee by sharpening skills.” A woman who has lost her position after years at one firm observes, “It’s like growing up. There’s no more Santa Claus.”

A corporate raider defends what he does by noting, “Debt can be an asset. Debt tightens a company.” A man who has lost his job complains, “After 28 years at IBM, I was surplus...You don’t see it coming.”

Grim economic news from the corporate world? Well, yes, but not all of it is real. The first example is from The New York Times’ week-long “Downsizing of America” series in March 1996, while the second comes from two movies (Barbarians at the Gate, 1993, and Disclosure, 1995). But in both cases, the stories are telling the same tale: heartless management is out to get you, the helpless worker. So has it always been. So will it always be.

Or has it? The popular impression of management gleaned the movies seems to have been relentlessly negative. Corporate executives are back-stabbing, smarmy, self-serving, self-aggrandizing, dishonest, and amoral. And that’s on a good day.

“Capitalism has always had a bad image,” observed business columnist Robert Samuelson in a recent Newsweek story. “No system based on the profit motive (a.k.a. “greed”) is a crowd pleaser...the largest source of misunderstanding about capitalism is the belief that most companies don’t care about long-term relationships. They’re eager to fire workers, shut plants and ditch suppliers in an instant to improve profits. Human values recede before rampant ‘short-termism.’ As with most stereotypes, this one is often true and sometimes tragically so...”

That impression has also been fed by recent movies. Wall Street (1987) purportedly exposed the corrupt world of corporate takeovers and the inhuman nature of American businessmen, who were more interested in profits and the game of buying and selling than in people’s lives or in producing something useful. The film’s villain, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), is the epitome of that breed, the takeover king who intoxicates and then corrupts young commodities trader Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) with the aroma of power and all that it brings. “Greed is good,” Gekko says. “Greed captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.”

Charlie Sheen (left) and Michael Douglas in Wall Street.

Barbarians at the Gate made the point just as effectively, and was also, purportedly, based on the actual buyout story of the R.J. Reynolds company in 1988. The TV-movie looks at the thrill of power and the greed, one-upmanship, and free-floating cash involved in such deals. It is business as game, the 20th Century way to prove manhood. It depicts a world where everyone cheats on everyone else and where a corporate raider admits he’s more interested in the macho stakes involved in acquiring a business than in its products. “It’s not the company,” he says. “It’s the credibility...I can’t just sit on the bench and let them play my game.”

Hollywood seems to be feeding popular impressions of businessmen as bad guys. But it isn’t quite that cut and dried. In fact, the image of management in the movies has undergone a curious evolution over the last 70 years, from hero to villain to something somewhere in between.

In the Beginning Was the Hero
In beginning, the businessman was not seen as inherently bad person. After all, as Calvin Coolidge observed, “the business of America is business.” In such early efforts at The Saphead (1920), Buster Keaton was shown as a naive innocent who saves his father’s business by becoming a Wall Street hero. And in American Madness (1932), Walter Huston plays Thomas Dickson, the head of a bank and also champion of the common man. As journalist Joseph McBride observed in Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, “Dickson believes in loaning money on character, or what he called ‘hunches,’ to small businessmen he trusts. ‘Jones is no risk,’ he says of one of them, ‘nor are the thousands of other Joneses throughout the country. It’s they who have built this nation to be the richest in the world, and it’s up to the banks to give them a break.’”

Dickson is a common sense financier (“The trouble with this country is that there’s too much hoarded cash,” he says. “I tell you, we’ve got to get the money in circulation before you’ll get this country back to prosperity”) and as such he fits the picture of benevolent businessman that dominated in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Dodsworth (1936), based on a Sinclair Lewis novel, found Walter Huston in a similar role as a sympathetic corporate leader who is, in the words of critic Jim Hitt, a “reserved and kindly manufacturer...[the movie] explored the possibility of whether a man could be a builder and also remain artistic and humane...”

In such films, business leaders knew how to take advantage of a good idea, and usually that put the smart business hero on the side of the little man. In Miracle on 34th Street (1947), corporate bigwig R.H. Macy allows his storefront Santa Claus to promote his competition and help his customers because it is a swell marketing ploy. And in My Man Godfrey (1936) the wealthy hero Godfrey (William Powell) is able to find work for the homeless by converting a useless city dump into a swank nightclub.

By the 1950s, the corporate hero was still doing good. Executive Suite (1954) is the best and most inspiring example. The boardroom drama depicts the competition for leadership in a major furniture manufacturing company after its charismatic leader suddenly dies. Who will guide the company? A visionary like Walling (William Holden) who loves the company for the great things it has done for ordinary people, or a bean-counter like Shaw (Frederic March) who is more concerned about returning maximum profit to the investors? Although Shaw’s view may be more dominant in the real-world ‘90s, Walling’s opinion is still more appealing.

“We have a bigger obligation than raising the dividend,” Walling says to the board. “We have an obligation to keep the company alive. Sometimes you have to use your profits for the growth of the company, not pay them all out in dividends to impress the stockholders with your management record...Turn your back on experimentation and you won’t have a tomorrow...The force behind a great company has to be more than the pride of one man, it has to be the pride of thousands. You can’t make men work for money alone. You starve their souls when you try it. And you can starve a company to death the same way.”

Similar issues are addressed in The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1956), showing how a great business leader must sacrifice his family – and his personal happiness – for the greater good of the company. He is the businessman as tragic hero. And even though the movie is generally positive about business, it does hint at deeper hypocrisy that exists.

“You offer qualified contradictory statements and watch your man’s face to see which pleases him,” Tom Rath (Gregory Peck) explains to his wife. “For instance, you can begin, ‘I think there are some wonderful things in this speech’ then you pause for a second or two. If that seems to make him happy, you go on...but if he looks a little startled on the word wonderful, then you switch and say, ‘But on the whole I don’t think it quite comes off.’ If you’ve been smart enough about it, you can wind up telling him exactly what he wants to hear. You’ve got to protect yourself.”

Clouds on the Horizon
Although generally positive until the late ‘50s, there were always a few clouds in filmdom’s sunny picture of the corporate world. From Germany, Fritz Lang’s silent science-fiction epic Metropolis (1926), took a negative view of the corporate-capitalist picture. In it, uniformed workers labor monotonously below ground, while the rich management types enjoy the fruits of those efforts in opulent surroundings. When the son of the “Master Industrialist” asks his dad about the inequity he is tersely rebuffed.

“It was their hands which built this city of ours, father,” says the youth. “But where are these hands in your scheme?”

“In their place,” replies the industrialist. “In the depths.”

Topaze (1933), based on a French novel, was just as negative, showing how the kindly, honest schoolteacher hero Auguste Topaze (John Barrymore) is corrupted by the unsavory practices of a corrupt business world. In fact, the movie was a precursor of the negative business images that would dominate in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

The British-born Charlie Chaplin was perhaps the most cynical of all. His Modern Times (1936) depicted the dehumanizing effects of assembly-line work, while the even darker Monsieur Verdoux (1947) equates the cold-hearted businessman with the equally cold-hearted murderer.

Preston Sturges was among the first American screenwriter-directors to poke fun at the absurdity of business practices with Christmas in July (1940). In it, his protagonist Jimmy (Dick Powell) is tricked into thinking he has won a Maxford House Coffee slogan contest and a $25,000 prize. Even though his slogan is nonsensical (“If you can’t sleep at night, it’s not the coffee, it’s the bunk”), his success convinces others that he is a genius and soon his boss has given him a promotion and wants him to come up with other slogans. In the movie, business is seen as a place where people are uncertain of their own ideas, fearful of breaking out from the assembly line of production or of ever being daring.

“I didn’t hang onto my father’s money by backing my own judgment,” explains the boss to Jimmy. “You know, I make mistakes every day...You see, I think your ideas are good because they sound good to me. But I know your ideas are good because you won this contest...over millions of aspirants...it’s what you might call commercial insurance, as when a horse wins the Derby, you back him for the Preakness.”

The Man in the White Suit (1951) was even darker, showing how management and labor were not benign at all but actively opposed to the common good. In the movie, they join forces to suppress an invention that would benefit all mankind.

Corruption Is Only the Beginning
Cinematically, things only got worse. As cold corporate thinking became more dominant in the ‘50s and ‘60s, a real world counter-culture began developing. Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America (1972) talked about “the betrayal of the American dream, the rise of the Corporate State of the 1960s, and the way in which the State dominates, exploits, and ultimately destroys both nature and man.” To Reich, the corporate state was “an immensely powerful machine, ordered...rational, yet utterly out of human control, wholly and perfectly indifferent to any human values.”

To address the new audience, movies in the ‘60s began depicting the corporation and management as working not for the state but for its own selfish interests. The Apartment (1960) shows the corporate world as an amoral swamp, in which executives take advantage of employees under them. In this case, the moral nebbish, Baxter (Jack Lemmon), works his way to the top not by sleeping with others but by letting his superiors use his apartment as a night spot for their trysts with their secretaries. How to Succeed in Business Without Even Trying (1967) goes even further in its satire, by celebrating the amorality of its hero. To many, James Bond is the ultimate corporate hero (see box).

Other filmmakers were not so sanguine about what they saw as the evil of the executive suite. Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa skewered big business, elevating corrupt management practices to the level of tragedy in The Bad Sleep Well (1960). Here, the hero (Toshiro Mifune) is a good man who must become bad to destroy the evil executives. "I cannot hate enough," he says at one point; at another: "You can't catch evil men by lawful means." The movie is a dark parable about terrible times in which to destroy the bad you must become even worse. Kurosawa holds out little hope for love, for goodness, for any of the charitable feelings to win out. Underneath big business’s facade of gentility, manners, and respectability lie horror and decay.Akira Kurosawa (in hat) with Toshiro Mifune in The Bad Sleep Well.

The dehumanizing effect of the Corporate State became a popular staple of paranoid parables, both on the big screen and on television. Three Days of the Condor (1975) found the corporation as The Company (CIA), where no one could be trusted and paranoia is the way of life (see also The Trial, 1963; 1984, 1984; and Brazil, 1985). On television, The Prisoner (1967) found the hero’s name replaced by a number as Big Brother controlled his every move. More recently, the Corporate State pursues TV’s Nowhere Man, erasing his identity as easily as some would swat a fly.

Times They Are A’Changing
If Hollywood needs villains, business types have made easy targets. Corporate critics like Chrysler CEO Robert Eaton has charged that articles like the New York Times’ “Downsizing of America” and films like Wall Street could lead to the “demonizing of corporate America.” But he needn’t worry. The truth is that Hollywood has not really abandoned the pro-business stance it demonstrated in American Madness and Executive Suite. Instead, it has modified it, trying, as always, to have it both ways.

Today’s movies about management, though laced with a savvy cynicism, are ultimately positive about the system, arguing that good will win out. Disclosure and Wall Street both find many top businessmen corrupt, but demonstrate that street smarts and integrity will triumph. In Big (1988), the company president (Robert Loggia) is seen as savvy enough to understand that charts and graphs are not the answer; a company has to have heart, as well – and he recognizes a kindred soul in the hero (Tom Hanks). And in Local Hero (1983), the oil corporation’s leader (Burt Lancaster) is so sympathetic to environmental questions that he changes his plans to construct an oil refinery.

Even Other People’s Money (1991), ostensibly an indictment of the amoral tactics of buyout king Larry the Liquidator (Danny De Vito) eventually comes out on the side of business. Larry, despicable as he is to some, is also shown as a forward thinker: he studies the successful Japanese and speaks their language, loves to play the violin, and is a romantic misanthrope. In the end, the company he acquires is not liquidated at all but turned to a more productive – and profitable – line of work. Larry’s tactics are validated.

Certainly there are still corporate villains in film. The boss is not interested in business but self and sex in such movies as 9 to 5 (1980), The Secret of My Success (1987), and Working Girl (1988). But in all three films, the spunky heroes, through gumption, intuition, and hard work succeed in getting to the top, showing that skill, though initially ignored, will eventually be appreciated by the corporation. In Success, the young hero (Michael J. Fox) is admired because he is full of energy, takes bold steps, and also looks for unorthodox solutions. He is a good thinker, but not recognized as such by his stuffed shirt bosses. The movie shows how wrong they are. “You did more in two months than most people do in a lifetime,” one admirer tells him.

As Janine Jackson, in Extra magazine points out about media coverage of business and its practices, such movies underscore the commonly held conservative idea that “a person’s economic circumstances are mostly a matter of individual effort. This pervasive theme was stated at one point [in the New York Times series on downsizing] as ‘the lesson, heard again and again [is] that while government and business can do some things, in the end, workers have little to fall back on but themselves.’”

In fact, such business films often reflect the feelings expressed by a character in Christmas in July, when she explains to the hard-hearted businessman why he should give her fiance a chance at a corporate position: “He belongs in here because he thinks he belongs in here...He belongs in here because he thinks he has ideas. He belongs in here until he proves himself or fails, and then somebody else belongs in here until he proves himself or fails...It’s one thing to muff a chance when you get it...but it’s another thing never to have had a chance...”

And in Hollywood, dream capital of the world, every employee can get that chance, usually to great success. Sigh. Brooklyn Bridge, anyone?

JAMES BOND,
COMPANY MAN

James Bond may be a glamorous fantasy figure to some, but to others, he is just another corporate 9 to 5 man. As Drew Moniot observes in his introduction to my book Bond and Beyond: 007 and Other Special Agents (Image Press), Secret Agent 007 is actually “a servant, of sorts – a cog in the intricate machinery of [his superior] M’s espionage bureau.”

Moniot notes that Bond is an office worker: “Unlike such counterparts as Derek Flint or Matt Helm who appear to be independently wealthy playboys, James Bond has much in common with the average audience member. He holds down a 9 to 5 office job and is part of an organizational enterprise. He is a manipulated and exploited employee, whose existence has been reduced to the contents of a manila folder in a gray metal cabinet. Though Bond is occasionally called upon to carry out dangerous and exciting missions, the escape from the routine will be only temporary and he will eventually return to the routine within the offices of Universal Export (the corporate front for the British Secret Service).”

Concludes Moniot: “In the end, Bond does not really destroy the Corporate State itself. He himself is part of [it]...and at the end of each adventure he returns to assume his proper place within that organization.”

WHY HOLLYWOOD SAYS
YOU SHOULD FEAR THE BOSS

Afraid of the boss? According to Hollywood, you should be. After all, he can steal your ideas (Working Girl),
erase your identity (The Prisoner), frame you and fire you (Disclosure), use your home as his brothel (The Apartment), try to kill you (Three Days of the Condor).
Be afraid. Be very, very afraid...