Entrée des employés

This is a remarkable little movie.

It has a bad guy that you actually have to like. Most of the story is spent setting him up as a conventional villain, a ruthless guy who capriciously ruins lives. A hateful, selfish man, arrogant and exploitative.

Along the way, he sleeps with a pretty employee and then when he finds she is married to his protégé he tries to ruin the pair. A man he fired kills himself, and the pretty girl (Loretta Young) tries to. In his manner, he is as brusque and offensive as he can be. He hires a floozy to compromise a fellow executive. He harangues everyone.

And yet by the end you actually like the guy and are surprised at being tricked into doing so. He fights to avoid laying off thousands of employees (because of the depression) in a fight to the death with the bankers. He proves to be honest, if misogynistic.

The two girls are incredibly sexy, as this was made just before the code slammed the shutters on women in film.

Alice White plays the floozy just before a sex scandal ruined her career a second time. She had previous been "helped" by a few directors including Chaplin. We are seeing a real fading flapper here.

Loretta Young, at 20 is as beautifully photographed as she would ever be. How odd to see the pretty girl as one who could be seduced so... twice.

But that's all by the way. The writing of this thing is so competent it rocked me back. I watch a lot of movies and usually have to let my imagination fill in for various deficiencies. Not so here. The writer of this also did the "Kennel Murder Case" of the same year, also excellent.

Excellent again. A good old straight ahead movie that fools you into thinking it is straight ahead and then it turns things a bit upside down.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Ya gotta love these pre-code flicks. Women looked and acted like real women, and men acted like the cads they often are. Warren William plays the tyrannical owner of a department store down on its luck. He hires and fires with absolute glee, and is an unrepentant womanizer. He hires a new salesgirl, played by the incredibly beautiful Loretta Young, and soon has his way with her. She falls for a fellow employee (Wallace Ford) and marries him secretly. William then turns his attention back to Young and... The film is an absolute hoot, and even includes a highly suggestive rape about-to-happen. Young is almost ethereal in her beauty, but this one's William's film all the way. His character is a cad, but in a strange way, a likable cad.

I saw this film recently on Turner Classics. It was a beautiful part of the wonderful past of Hollywood. Warren's great voice still haunts me. It was, as they say "mello as a cello". Real good stuff!! I have become a Warren William fan. I looked up his bio on your WEB. He made a ton of movies with all the top stars of Tinsel Town. He also made some not so good movies, but that's par for the Hollywood story. I have ordered about ten of his movie efforts and look forward with great anticipation in seeing them. Because I was not familial with him till TCM came along and presented some of his work. Sadley he died quite young at 54. Fortunattly we still have him to enjoy with the Hollwood Classics.

I ran across this movie by chance and then ran to IMBD to learn more about it. I was amazed by how the film enlightened me on the era and actually how similar corporations and people in them still behave today.. William Warren is excellent in the role of the tyrannical boss with the hots for the married sales girl (Loretta Young). I was surprised by the the openness of the film (for the time), but apparently after reading some of the other comments, this is typical of the pre-code era of films. Too bad things had to change. You can pick up a lot of social history from this kind of film despite it being a bit one dimensional.

Behind the pedestrian title lurks a rather savage look at survival-era capitalism as played out during that desperate depression year of 1933. Who else is better outfitted to protect the average working stiff from cut-throat competition and unemployment than a tiger shark bigger than those circling around. Department store shark Warren William is in charge of 12,000 average Joe's, and by golly he's going to keep them swimming even if he has to eat half of them in the process. Bravura performance from William-- watch his eyes slink around the hallway before he enters the hotel room to ravish a drunkenly compliant Loretta Young. His authoritative presence commands the movie as completely as he does his underlings. Film may come as a revelation to viewers unfamiliar with pre-Code Hollywood, before the censors took over in 1934. Nonetheless, it was an era of social frankness that would not emerge again until the counter-cultural 1960's, while the movie itself would play as well today as it did then, as one reviewer sagely observes.

Much of film's value lies in getting us to think about the appeal a strongman-tyrant presents during turbulent times. We loathe William's ruthless and often cruel tactics. But at the same time he's inventive, decisive, and brutally logical-- with a single-minded dedication that goes beyond personal happiness. In short, he becomes The Department Store in the same way an effective tyrant can personify The State. He's a figure to be loathed, yet grudgingly admired at the same time, while it's a credit to the film-makers that they pull off the ambivalence as well as they do. Two scenes stay with me that help define William's compelling side--watch him nearly throw up at the smarmy speech given in behalf of the store's worthless owners, plus his face-to-face denunciation of bankers as parasitically unproductive, a passage that probably brought depression-era audiences to their feet.There are also unexpected deposits of humor, such as the bald man/balloon gag that is hilariously inventive and likely a brainstorm from ace director Roy del Ruth. On the other hand, Wallace Ford simply lacks the kind of edge to make his role as William's assistant plausible. Instead, a face-off between William and, say, Cagney would have exploded the screen.

Anyhow, don't let the forgettable title or the now obscure Warren William fool you. There are so many memorable glimpses of human honesty, that the movie must be seen to be appreciated, especially by those unfamiliar with the pre-Code era. So catch up with this cynical little gem if you can.