Word: calhern
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Executive Suite (MGM) is loaded with enough big names to tear the marquee off the average movie house. William Holden, June Allyson, Barbara Stanwyck, Fredric March, Walter Pidgeon, Shelley Winters, Paul Douglas, Louis Calhern, Dean Jagger and Nina Foch-all appear in this adaptation of Cameron Hawley's bestselling novel about big businessmen locked in a grim struggle for power. And when all the stars together set up a fiercely competitive twinkle for attention, the moviegoer is apt to feel somewhat like a switchboard operator with ten calls blinking at once...
...Five vice-presidents circle each other like pinstriped tigers on the broadloom of the executive suite. Comptroller Fredric March quickly moves to the inside track. An office politician of the know-the-other-fellow's-weakness variety, he buys the vote of Board Member Louis Calhern with the promise of a stock gift, lines up Paul Douglas (Sales) by showing how much he knows about something he shouldn't (Shelley Winters). And to sew everything up tight, March sweet-talks a proxy out of Barbara Stanwyck, who loved the dead man, although he was always too busy with...
When all is over, however, one last dilemma remains: what is MGM going to do with all those plaster busts of Louis Calhern...
...play--a scene in which Antony stares almost mockingly at a bust of Caesar and then seats himself in a chair as though it were a throne. In the case of Caesar, Shakespeare's portrait is curiously ambiguous--on the one hand noble, on the other blustering and vain. Calhern's interpretation emphasizes the latter qualities and even goes beyond them. Ineffectual and exuding senility, his Caesar is the one lamentable portrayal in the film...
...creakingly moves to Brazil and is taken over by the Rio de Janeiro chamber of commerce. In between plugs for the heady Brazilian climate, Lund falls off polo ponies and Lana exchanges passionate glances with Ricardo Montalban, who plays a bare-chested rancher with a coyly devilish grandfather (Louis Calhern). Since the plot offers no clear reason why the movie should run 104 Technicolored minutes, Scenarist Isobel Lennart has thrown in such extraneous items as a funnyman from the U.S. Embassy (Archer MacDonald), a brace of psychoanalysts (fast replacing mothers-in-law as Hollywood's stock figure...