Patterns (1956)

Directed by Fielder Cook; written by Rod Serling

In celebration of the two-year anniversary of Word & Song we are offering through July a special rate on paid, gift, and upgraded subscriptions.

Join us for Poetry Aloud (our Friday podcast for paid subscribers), when Dr. Esolen will read chapters 3 and 4 of Huckleberry Finn! If you missed the first two chapters, click below to catch up.

Huckleberry Finn (Aloud)

Our Word of the Week has been wealth, and we’ve been discussing what it really means to be well or to do well; and that’s led us to look upon the Cross as true riches, for which you would trade all your worldly goods, just as the merchant in the parable, seeking goodly pearls, found one pearl of great price and sold all he had to obtain that pearl. But what if we return to the gritty world of high finance, business operations, and money making, wherein you can give your life blood and try to be a half decent man and yet be ground to powder? That is the world of our Film of the Week, Patterns — superbly directed by Fielder Cook, and written by that master of Greek tragedy in American form, Rod Serling.

You’ll likely remember Rod Serling as the creator of what I consider one of the two or three greatest of American television shows, The Twilight Zone. It’s too easy to call that show “science fiction,” or “Gothic horror,” when in fact most of the plots were tragic in the Greek sense, while most of the rest were comic in the Christian sense: tragedies of human error or folly; comedies of redemption. Whatever there was about science fiction, such as space travel, was by way of providing an unusual stage for the tragedy or, less commonly, for the redemption, so that we might see ancient truths anew. Take away the planets or the little boy who can make monsters by willing it or the future dystopia where everybody is happy and beautiful and air-headed, and you get Serling writing things like Requiem for a Heavyweight (film version, 1962), about a punch-drunk prizefighter whose life is unraveling, or this week’s devastating and deeply ambiguous analysis of good and evil in the boardroom.

Van Heflin plays a youngish married man, Fred Staples, who has run a fine business in Cincinnati, suddenly offered a high-level executive job by the parent company in New York. That job comes complete with a stylish house to live in, and a personal secretary — transferred from a gentle old fellow, Bill Briggs (Ed Begley), whom, as we slowly learn, Staples has been hired to replace. Briggs believes in the human side of business, and is always hesitant to shut down a plant anywhere just because it is not earning its keep. But the chief executive, Mr. Ramsey (Everett Sloane in the role of a lifetime), despises Briggs, a holdover from when his father ran the company “with the air of a cathedral,” as he says contemptuously — and that image is apt. For this film actually begins with church bells tolling the hymn Tantum Ergo Sacramentum, and every time we enter the forty-some story tower that is the home of Ramsey and Company, the camera shows us the high ceilings, vaulted and coffered, reminiscent in fact of a cathedral. Those too are “patterns,” but they have been shifted from the worship of God to the pursuit, relentless and unapologetic, of success, defined in purely material terms.

The movie is not sentimental. Briggs is a good man, but he has become ineffectual; he is a widower with a very nice teenage son, whom he loves dearly but whom he disappoints time and again. He also drinks too much, and his health is bad. Staples, says Briggs, may be a better industrial engineer than a man; but the two become good friends anyway. Ramsey says outright, “I am not a nice man,” and he is perfectly willing to tear Briggs to shreds before the rest of the board. When he assigns Staples and Briggs to write a report together, he is able to distinguish between the work of the young man and that of his elder, much to Briggs’ disadvantage. Ramsey is, after all, extremely good at what he does, which is to find talent, to give it responsibility, to reward it, and to push it as hard as he can. He does not want to fire Briggs. That isn’t done. He wants to make life at the company so miserable for Briggs that he will resign. But Briggs does not want to do that.

To complicate matters further, Staples’ wife, Nancy (Beatrice Straight), believes in her husband and is subtly pushing him to make his way in the business, because the quality of his work warrants it. She doesn’t have a hankering for money and the high life. She does have a hankering for ambition — Fred’s ambition. She does not see why Fred must take second place to Bill Briggs, when he knows perfectly well that the great ideas in the report they have submitted are Fred’s and not Bill’s. At a large dinner party at their house, she allows Mr. Ramsey to retire to the study, alone, where he can read a copy of the report, without Fred’s knowledge. That gives Ramsey all the ammunition he needs.

“I hate your guts!” — Fred will say that to Ramsey, and you may not be surprised to learn that Ramsey does not care, not a bit. Not that he smiles and shrugs, either. Hatred, mingled with respect and the power of will, must characterize the relations of these two men, who will be in opposition to one another — we suspect, a dynamic opposition. The risk is great, and there are casualties. I will not reveal the end — it will strike you as a surprise, and yet, if you look at things carefully, you will see that Serling has prepared us for it all along. And none of the issues the film raises will be resolved.

Watch Patterns for the three principal characters, who play their roles to the hilt, and for a very strong and sharply focused supporting cast, including Elizabeth Wilson as Briggs’ loyal secretary, and a teenage kid named Ronnie Welsh as Briggs’ winsome son, who must make allowances for his father. Watch it also for Serling’s tight writing, with absolutely nothing included that does not add materially to the effect of the whole, and for Cook’s playhouse-style direction. I make that comment advisedly: Serling and Cook had already made Patterns for an episode of the hour-long Kraft Theater, with Sloane and Begley in the same roles, and with Richard Kiley, a favorite here at Word and Song, playing the role of Fred Staples. Those old playhouse series showed what television could do, and Hollywood itself was the better for it — and the full film version of Patterns proves it.

---