So I'm flipping channels the other day when I come across a black-and-white movie starring William Holden, June Allyson, Barbara Stanwyck, Frederick March, and just about every one of those actors who seemed to show up in every movie made in the 1950s.
It was a movie called "Executive Suite,'' although I didn't realize it until I looked it up. Turns out, according to one review, it's considered an "overlooked" drama, although it was nominated for a handful of Academy Awards. One interesting thing about the movie is that it has absolutely no musical soundtrack. And it does an outstanding job of covering issues of insider trading, board manipulation, and sexual harassment, proving that there really isn't anything new under the sun after all.
It's about a furniture company whose president dies, and the struggle ensues over who will take over and how the company will be run.
However, there was this one scene in the movie that struck me. William Holden and June Allyson's son has a big baseball game that is apparently very important to everyone in the town within which they live. It's basically a little league game - the kids look to be about 12 years old - but the stands are packed. Holden-Allyson's son is pitching, holding on to a 2-0 lead when he gives up a big hit that scores a run. Then he starts pitching to the next batter, and can't throw a strike.
Some of the adults in the stands are cheering and clapping, but some are booing.
That's right: booing! The adults - the parents of the kids playing the game - are cheering and clapping and booing and calling out what I guess was 1950s trash-talk from the stands.
Today, of course, that scene would be considered so offensive as to warrant boycotts of the movie - except that such a scene would have no more of a chance of being included in a movie today than terrorists in a movie actually being identified as being radical followers of Islam.
And then the climax of the movie involves this impassioned speech by William Holden's character in which he says the company will go back to making the kind of furniture that made the company famous, quality furniture that the workers in the factory will be proud to make and that the salesmen of that furniture will take pride in showing to potential customers.
The ending doesn't sound very exciting, I know. But the truth is, it's remarkable that there is no force or trickery or deceit but just an impassioned speech on quality and pride.
And it hits me that the qualities that William Holden stands up for are the qualities his movie-screen son learns by performing in front of a crowd of people that aren't worried about hurting his self-esteem or wounding his pride. They're simply watching a ball game, treating the kids playing like ball players; ball players who sometimes do well and sometimes don't do so well.
Today, of course, we'd have to cheer the young boy as he throws ball after ball simply for trying.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not for booing young kids at little league baseball games. But neither am I for giving everyone a trophy just for showing up and telling a kid who blows the big game, "That's all right; you did your best."
I was a kid once. I played a lot of sports. I knew when I didn't do well and I knew when I did.
But I also knew the kids that weren't very good, the ones whose parents fought to make sure there were enough "all-star'' teams so that every kid that wanted to be an all-star got to be one; that did away with trophies for first place and made sure every kid on every team got a trophy; who did away with recognition for being the best and made sure everyone was recognized for trying.
And the only kids it fooled were the kids who weren't really trying in the first place.
It occurs to me that our modern American world is being run by those people who, as children, never learned to face their own failure or to stand up in the face of negative reaction; kids whose idea of 'standing up' to the playground bully was to attach themselves to an authority figure for protection, looking to the adults to stop other kids from being so mean, and rallying around the motto "It's not fair!"
You don't learn to stand up for yourself, to face down your fears and critics, to develop confidence in yourself if you're not challenged. And honestly, is there anyone who doesn't learn more from failure than success? What was that famous story about Thomas Edison and how he failed to produce the light bulb the first 14,000 times he tried, but still considered everyone of those 14,000 failures a success because each one taught him something and got him closer to success?
Yet today's society would remove all such challenges from all of us - particularly our children - if they had their way. No wonder we're living in a society that believes government should look after us; that government is there to enforce artificially created standards that says each one of us is a success in our own right.
OK, the analogy breaks down at some point. In fact, I might actually have gotten lost in there somewhere.
The point is that in facing the school yard bully, or being put in positions where it is obvious we succeed or fail, we develop the kind of character that causes William Holden to stand up to his fellow executives, face their apparently unknown (to him) conspiracy, and win the day with an argument based on truth, self-worth, and restoring a sense of pride in what they can produce and sell.
By the way - the kid in the movie? After throwing three balls, he came back and won the game.
We don't know how. Williams Holden didn't stay for the end of the game because he had to get to the board meeting that would determine the future of the company.
But at the end he asks wife June Allyson who won and she answers, "We did."
It's one of those 1950s moments where you understand she's speaking for them all.
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