Just got the DVD is this terrific film, which has been a favorite of mine for years.
William Holden and June Allyson(!)'s house is Hollywood's idea of mid-century modern. Probably mostly California stuff, but some nice lamps and there's a big Bubble Lamp hanging in Holden's home office.
It's a scream to imagine that June Allyson, surely one of the worst actresses of the era lived in such a house. And her patented hairdo is such a 'hairdon't'.
Allyson
I always thought she was light weight as an actress, and I never cared for her 'look'. She wore the same hairdo for 20 years!
Everyone else in the film is first-rate. What a hellava cast, and what a nice house Holden and Allyson 'lived' in.
After all, Holden was the head furniture designer at Tredway.
...and how many other films were made about a furniture company?????
i really never thought Jun...
i really never thought June Allison was a great actress
either and that hair do ..... wow ... she had a unusual voice but she was as they called in that day "wholesome"
Something that would offend even the best looking gal today.
Barry I hate to say it but these young kids that read this forum don't have a freakin idea what you and I are talking about June Allison maybe KOEN does,
Every age of Hollywood...
produces a range of stereotypes (and an occassional archetype) to mirror how the audience sees themselves.
While I agree that June did not fill me with fantasies of burning her down under the comforter, her box office success remains evidence that at one time in America audiences could let women out of their two current movie straight jackets of--the smart hump and the tough bitch. The audiences of the 40s and 50s could not only fantasize about the brilliant man-woman--Kate Hepburn, or the hot bombshell--Rita Haworth, or the haughty bitch--Bette Davis: they could also identify with a plump, frumpy, and kind little blond.
In my life, even in the sexual revolution, the material girl revolution, the career girl revolution, and the recent decline of America into a warring, torturing, bankrupted republic brought to its economic and political knees by kleptocracy, I've met a helluva lot more June's (at least on the surface) than Kate's, or Ritas, or Bette's.
If I were a contemporary woman in a toilet stall in the bathroom of a club sticking my finger down the back of my throat to purge myself of the dissonance between what I look like and what today's ad and movie imagery says I should look like, I might be rather grateful to escape our time and live in a time when June Allyson could be a star.
Yes, June had a two pack a day voice. Yes, she supposedly became an alkie for a time. Yes, her image was an impossibly wholesome straight jacket for her professionally. But Rita found it a straight jacket to be Gilda again and again. Frankly, I bet women (and men) of June's time were just a little better off for having a firmament in which at least one fantasy star did not have to be thin, sexy, gorgeous, chic and either coldly detached or a Prada bitch.
Pt. 2
If June were to magically come along today, maybe women would feel a little permission to be chubby, rather than be driven further and further into the grips of skinny-ism and the inevitable binge eating that leads to unhealthy obesity and purge dieting that leads so often to tragedy.
Female (and male for that matter) film stars just don't look or act vaguely like 99 percent of the persons I meet on the street, in the market, at work, or at the beach. Female stars either look like phenomenal beauties, or freaks. The men either look like phenomenal hunks, or freaks. Physical resemblance to real people is not even attempted.
Today, June Allyson has been turned into the grotesquery of Kathy Bates. Sorry, Kahy, but you have to be judged by your work and your work is a gallery of grotesques. I know Kathy, you are as straight jacketed in your time as June was in hers. And its not your fault today's audiences only want to pay to see the grotesques you create.
But, oh, how I wish, for those women stuck in bathrooms everywhere with their brittle nails gouging at their epiglottises, that Kathy Bates could be viewed as a star for being frumpy and kindly and truly loved by the male lead, as was June. June regularly got Van Johnson, and Jimmy Stewart, and William Holden to love her in movies. Kathy Bates has to make do with torturing James Caan at a low point in his career, or sitting around in chic flicks bad mouthing men, or not working at all. And Kathy can really act.
Put aside the actress, LRF
I didn't mention this DVD because of June Allyson...I mentioned it because it's probably the only mid-century film (1953) about a furniture manufacturing company, and there's one character who has what Hollywood thought was the definitive modern home.
It's a great film, and I recommend it to anybody, whether they like design or not.
barrympls...
About the movie, Executive Suite...
McDonald Walling: We'll have a line of low-priced furniture, a new and different line--as different from anything we're making today as a modern automobile is different from a covered wagon. That's what you want Walt, isn't it--what you've always wanted? Merchandise that will sell because it had beauty and function and value--not because the buyers like your scotch or think that you're a good egg. The kind of stuff that you, Jesse, will feel in your guts when you know it's coming off your production line. A kind of product that you will be able to budget to the nearest hundredth of a cent, Shaw, because it will be scientifically and efficiently designed. And something you will be proud to have your name on, Miss Tredway.
I believe this was the idea of modernism that swept an America from the 50s to the early 60s and then became a caricature of itself thereafter. These Americans were a people deprived by ten years of Great Depression of the 30s and then denied all manner of new products for the sake of 4 years of war production from 1941 to 45. Americans of this time knew scarcity of basics during the Great depression and then rationed scarcity of durable goods (cars, furniture, washing machines, reefers, etc.), new housing, and anything made with nylon or rubber (tires, stockings, etc.). They wanted plenty and wanted comfort and they decided, through some combination of individual choice and heavy corporate and government propaganda, that modernist design was a desirable path out of the nighmare of deprivation, denial and savagery of the previous 14 years. And alot of them recalled the first world war as well. Those Americans were a people that were already far along toward augmenting their own fantasies of what was desirable and beautiful with what Hollywood and Madison Avenue told them was good and beautiful.
Pt 2
To them, Modernist products meant something that could be rationally designed, produced with scientifically controlled means to achieve both high quality and low price, and offer a new aesthetic that could signal they were turning their collective backs on a recent, botched, and horrific past and trying to live in a new, rational, little d democratic, little s scientific world of a mass produced good life not exactly for everyone, but for enough persons so as to avoid mass suffering and deprivation that could be exploited by the power mongers. Implicit in this ethos was that authoritarian governments and monopoly corporations were corrupt and going to try to get theirs regardless. And they were going to exploit the deprivation and want in the world to start terrible wars to take whatever they wanted. The solution was to make sure that peoples (of your nation and of others) that could threaten your prosperity because they were experiencing deprivation were made prosperous enough not to become problems again. And when peoples of other nations became problematic, the idea was to intimidate them on the one hand with force and make them prosperous on the other, so they too would have enough of everything not to want to lose it and so would consent to a stability that preserved your own prosperity and stability.
Goods that could contribute to this kind of prosperity and stability had to be mass produced and they had to have enough substitutability of parts that the same basic table could be produced with cheap, unsubtle color and textures for the unrefined plebs, and then be re-specced in more tasteful combination for the better educated, more refined managerial class that was to be developed to run the New World Order Version 1.0, which was what USA and UK central bankers sought to create in the blood stained aftermath of the world war that they had to not insignificant extent helped financed both sides of.
But the best laid plans of mice and new world order builders often go astray (does this sound familiar, or what?).
Modernist products penetrated markets unevenly. There was more resistance to the new than was expected, even though the frequent suggestion planting by Hollywood and Madison Avenue that Modernist goods were the things to have, proved that you could make the knuckle draggers in Peoria give up their prewar big radiator cars for post war streamlined jelly beans--the kinds of streamlined jelly beans that had failed before the war.
pt 3
The trouble was that even though you could mass produce these modernist goods, and accessorize them up and down markets in principle and in production, marketing to the different classes of persons required different appeals and different branding. And the whole image of highly efficient modernism really didn't sell very well to people who had been so deprived of good times and the good life before and during the war that they wanted to have it all now and have fun having it. Who wanted a severe, astringent modernism personified by weird little guys in black, owl rimmed glasses? The age demanded a happy go lucky guy who loved wacky combinations of color, chrome, plastic wood and formica--a guy who could look like he was having a good time with Modernism--a guy who could make efficiency seem like a hoot. Enter Charles Eames. If we're going to ask our people to work their butts off producing goods not only for America, but the rest of the war destroyed world also, and if we're going to make them substitute mass produced machined metal and plastic goods for all the traditional materials and designs they are used to, then we've got to make them look fun and practical and hopefully work better too. These goods--these toys--are what we are going to distract them with while we ask them to work their butts off producing for the whole world. They've got to look more like fun than a chrome torture rack with black leather hammock like that old fascist Corbusier used to make for a chaise.
pt 4
And the stuff for the managerial class, its got to look expensive, but not cost much. So: get rid of the ornaments. Get rid of the high cost, slow growing walnut. Make it seem exotic by using wood from some god forsaken jungle where we get it for nothing, ship it in the empty spaces in the freighters that are already bringing us tungsten, or tin, or trinkets, or whatever, that we are extracting to create jobs in the conquered lands and cheap materials for our factories.
Make the stuff for the managerial class seem ultra rational, sensible, and comfortable. We want these college grads coming to work every day to keep the machine greased. Rationalize the offices so that it minimizes the irritations and slots these guys so they think their job is their whole world.
The office buildings are machines for working in. They are not to have fun there. They are there to make the system work as rationally and efficiently as possible. They can wear bermudas at home sitting in their mass produced, streamlined lawn chairs in front of their mass produced, ornament free charcoal grills swilling their mass produced, mass marketed beers. But at the office, they wear their mass produced suits, got it? The only color is on the tie and the tie colors recall the war colors of the old Scottish clans and the British aristocracy. We're on a military model people. We're going to dress it up and rationalize and lean it up, but we're talking about using modernist buildings, modernist products, and modernist ethos to suffuse the working plebes and the managerial class with enough prosperity to create the stability we need to get New World Order Version 1.0 up and runnning.
This I think may have been the cultural subtext of Executive Suite--for better and for worse.
And your point is?
I wasn't even going for that level of physchology, as regards that film. The furniture company in question, Tredway, was probably thought to be a typical "Grand Rapids" type of company that made period quality reproductions, as well as a cheap line for access profit.
Holden's character, although they don't show any of his designs, apparently was into more modern stuff in his private life, and MGM's designers tried to show that by furnishing his house and office with what they considered new and cutting-edge modern.
As with the 1950's TV show, "My Little Margie", which although it takes place in New York, also used modern furniture. The Albright's New York apartment is filled with rather good California 1950's furniture. Not crazy cutting-edge stuff, but nice California Modern.
The producers of that show, as well as the people at MGM's design department, furnished these sets with furniture that they considered hip and modern.
For example, the two bedroom lamps in Holden's bedroom (Executive Suite) are really nice. They are probably California wrought iron pieces.
Seeing the bubble lamp prominantly desplayed in a 1953 movie was damn cool.
But, I was merely raving about a good movie to people who might find the sets worthy of their attention, not to mention it's a wonderful film. The backstory about what
Tredway was suppose to represent was not something I was trying to bring forth.
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