Loretta Young

Employees’ Entrance

by
Madeline and Kurt

Employees’ Entrance is a short, sharp and strange film, from the title on downward. A drama made in 1933 and set in a department store in the teeth of the Great Depression, it takes a look at rapacious capitalism in the form of its central character – Warren William as the time-and-motion guy Kurt Anderson, who somehow gains control of a business that’s been run almost on feudal lines till he came along. Kurt is a price-of-everything-value-of-nothing badass and though his technique isn’t all slash and burn, his management style is brusque, hectoring and unsympathetic and he demands total loyalty from his staff, who he expects to be on call 24/7. On the … Read more

The Stranger

by
Mr Wilson with Mary

The Stranger is an entertaining enough noirish thriller but the real fun comes from watching it as a contest between a maverick director and a studio that wanted their hireling to turn out Hollywood product rather than a grand auteurish statement. The director is Orson Welles and the year is 1946. Welles was at a low ebb. He hadn’t been let near a feature film on his own for four years. 1941’s Citizen Kane had flopped and the follow-up, The Magnificent Ambersons, had gone so far over schedule and over budget that the studio had taken it off Welles, cut an hour and reshot whole chunks of it. It also bombed. Future generations … Read more