Employees Entrance
            
Director: Roy Del Ruth
Year: 1933
Rating: 5.5
"I didn't recognize you with your clothes on" says the boss to his female employee throwing you right into pre-code film. A tryst with another female worker makes sure of it. But what I found more interesting was its bitter cutthroat attack on capitalism. 1933 was the brunt of the Depression when having a job was salvation and losing one was a ticket to poverty and bread lines. We often see stats now about people living from paycheck to paycheck and having savings that could only take them a few weeks.  In the Depression people lost their savings in banks and the markets and there were no social programs to assist you through hard times. It was a good time for predatory bosses. No actor at the time could play a nasty boss like Warren William. He practically made a living playing one for Warners. But never as rotten as here where the bottom line was more important than lives. He is as ruthless as a professional killer, but he does it with a pink slip.

 

He manages the Monroe Dept. store - a massively successful business for decades though when the Depression hit, like everyone else it fell on hard times and Anderson (William) has to navigate the store through it. If people didn't produce or come up to his standards, out they went. This begins as a sly comedy but over the film, it sheds the comedy to fall into full-fledged melodrama. One might expect that at some point, Anderson will be redeemed - realize he has gone too far and show some kindness. But this is not Dickens and Scrooge. This is pure capitalism with no restraints. Just keep the profits rolling in. But to be fair, at one point he says he has to be a prick in order to keep his people working.

 

He would not do well in today's Me Too times. He sees Madeline sitting in his store in the model home exhibit. She has nowhere to go and wants a job. She is played by Loretta Young and is gorgeous. He flirts with her, she responds, he invites her out to dinner, at his apartment and when she is ready to leave, makes it clear that he expects a favor in return and the camera fades out leaving us with the assumption that he got it because she got the job. She falls in love with another man at the store - Martin - who Anderson is grooming to be as big a shit as he is. You have to be cruel to be kind. Don't let any woman deter you, complicate your life. This store has to become your life.

 

Wallace Ford as Anderson has the personality of a rubber ball. More sexual shenanigans and business decisions ahead. This seems to be a highly respected film - and "the film was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". But it didn't really work for me - there was no warmth or humanity - everyone is guilty - but it was the Depression. The girl who he could not recognize with her clothes on was Alice White - a star during the silent comedies and has quite the gold-digger attitude about her in this. Anderson pays her $70 a week to keep the cousin of the owner busy and out of his hair. Busy means just what you think it does. $70 was happy times back then.