Corporate Sentimentality
BOROFF, DAVID
ON TELEVISION By David Boroff Corporate Sentimentality During the '30s and '40s, it was always Main Street against Wall Street. In movies like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to...
...In the first episode of the season, Brennan is a little concerned about the decline of free enterprise—"the individual doesn't have the same chance to blaze trails...
...Smith Goes to Washington, an ingenuous small-town type—usually played by James Stewart or Gary Cooper—confronted, in unequal struggle, a heavyweight tycoon or Wall Street lawyer or unscrupulous politician...
...Deeds when they apply to a bank for a loan and are peremptorily turned down...
...In fact, it is in the big corporations that one finds the best working conditions, the highest wages, and the most opulent fringe benefits...
...The Tycoon is more Booth Tarkington than C. Wright Mills...
...An aging Italian farmer refuses to vacate his farm in California to the Thunder Corporation —acreage desperately needed for expansion...
...Is it going to be James Stewart or William Whyte Jr...
...In short order, the tycoon in mufti invents a new jack, presents it to his own corporation to be manufactured, and installs as production chief his garage partner who knew him as only as a slightly dotty but handy old man...
...Brennan provides a kind of dream-world reassurance for the tens of thousands of old people now on the shelf...
...How, then, is television, which dearly loves to traffic with folkloristic notions, going to deal with corporations...
...Cowan, of course, gets his comeuppance shortly before 10 P.M...
...In the end, a mixture of honesty and a certain kind of backwoods cunning triumphed...
...In a subsequent episode, there is an even more blatant manipulation of old sentimentalities and new realities...
...Happy ending—except for Jerome Cowan, who pays the bet by working a month on the assembly line...
...But even the banker, that familiar object of populist ire, is redeemed when Brennan admits "he is not a bad guy...
...There is a slight touch of Mr...
...He therefore disengages temporarily from Thunder Corporations and moves to a small, bustling town where he will make it on his own...
...It turns out to be a pristine corporation type, played for pratfall laughs by Jerome Cowan, who is constantly maneuvering to get the crusty old chairman of the board to retire...
...Old Walter Brennan takes it upon himself to persuade the die-hard farmer to move out...
...one of several new situation comedies this season, the protagonist is chairman of the board of a large, aggressive corporation...
...The only way you fellows keep fit is by trying to push me out," Brennan tells him...
...One can even argue that Born Yesterday was simply an urban variation of the same theme—the honest liberal against the ruthless industrialist...
...This was the "little man" against the corporation, the small town against the big city, the rube against the worldling...
...Brennan and the farmer turn out to be natural allies...
...Cowan, that he can achieve success within a few months...
...The old man cajoles a garage owner into hiring him, then bullies him into a partnership even though he has no money to invest in the business...
...The answer, of course—in TV'S classic fashion—is both...
...There is obviously another theme here close to the popular nerve, and that is retirement and the role of the aging...
...The farmer's property will remain in his possession (though he had previously signed it away), he will continue to till the soil, and when he is too old to work, the corporation will then build on the property...
...Touched by the old Italian's plight, Brennan works out a splendid compromise arrangement...
...As played by Walter Brennan, however, he is a bucolic type who brings to corporate life salty common sense, old-fashioned individualism, and a full measure of paternal benevolence...
...He has made a bet with his corporation antagonist...
...When the tycoon arrives, the embattled old man threatens to shoot him...
...But Walter Brennan is engaging, the gags are occasionally bright, and who can grumble at the triumph of the benign...
...They make more cars in America but no grapes,' the sad old man says...
...every Tuesday evening...
...In other words...
...In The Tycoon (Tuesdays, ABC, 9:00 P.M...
...Who can be the enemy in this great bowl of treacle...
...But in the last 15 years or so, corporations have been thoroughly sanitized...
...What any of this has to do with contemporary corporate realities is another matter...
Vol. 47 • October 1964 • No. 21
