Executive Suite

Robert Wise’s 1954 boardroom drama winds up disingenuously pulling most of its corporate punches, but it was still the pioneering effort in a genre that’s long since gone out of fashion. Read full review

All-star boardroom intrigue, with William Holden, Fredric March, Walter Pidgeon and others vying for corporate control after a company chairman dies. [19 Nov 1997, p.M]

Director ROBERT WISE's Executive Suite intelligently examines the rivalries among executives of an American corporation. [21 Apr 2002, p.9]

Here is a magnificent motion picture that meets the standard of greatness on almost every count. Read full review

The boardroom finale pits William Holden's junior exec against Fredric March's numbers-obsessed comptroller (interestingly, just three years after March played Willy Loman on screen in Death of a Salesman). Both are tops, and superb all-star casting also enables Barbara Stanwyck to go into big-scene hysterics. June Allyson even plays catch with young Tim Considine in one scene, and she's pretty good. [09 Nov 2007, p.7E]

This John Houseman production is a real pro job, of a calibre that doesn't come along too often. Cameron Hawley's novel, Executive Suite, was good reading, and Ernest Lehman has fashioned it into screen form as a dramatically interesting motion picture humanizing big business and its upper echelon personalities. Read full review