Patterns (1956)
Directed by Fielder Cook
This adaptation of a Rod Serling teleplay offers a contemporaneous look at the corporate culture Matthew Weiner worked hard to re-create, featuring Fewer-Than-Twelve Angry (Mad?) Men debating business interests vs. basic decency. It opens with the skyscraper-shaded streets of lower Manhattan, tintinnabulating with the tolling bells of Trinity Church; they toll for a charitable but aging Ed Begley, playing a Willy Loman type, up against an uncannily Bloombergian Everett Sloane and getting left behind by the most reactionary sort of progress. Patterns captures a transitional moment, before the term “ruthless American businessman” was assumed redundant, when a few of them still had honor and character–just before the country went full Vader. Henry Stewart (Apr 4, 5, 4pm, at the Museum of the Moving Image’s “Mad Men’s Movie Influences“)