RE F L OU R LA OR WAR EAGLE T H E A T R E C T E
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F rom the silent era to outrageous satire to gut-wrenching portrayals of corporate dilemmas. For nearly a century, film and television have chronicled the American workplace. Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times” set off the genre in 1936. One of the last major silent movies, it follows the actor’s “Little Tramp” character — in his final onscreen appearance — as he endures the mechanized monolith of the industrial revolution. He gets trapped in giant gears, loses a race with an assembly line and later crusades for workers’ rights before ultimately walking away from it all. The movie was an indictment of the era’s inhumanity. And it was eerily prescient of depictions of workplace discontent that would surface in the decades that followed.
In “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” (1956), Gregory Peck plays WWII vet Tom Rath, who lands a fast-track position at a highly influential company. Rath, a devoted family man, faces perhaps the first onscreen depiction of the work-life balance debacle. The job is prestigious and lucrative, but it turns Rath into a corporate drone, demanding his days, nights and weekends and alienating him from the idyllic post-war life he’d envisioned. Some 50 years later, TV’s “Mad Men” viewers would meet mid-century workaholic, alcoholic, womanizing ad exec Don Draper, who, in retrospect, might be seen as the anti-Rath. The early ’60s comedy series “The Dick Van Dyke Show” focused on Rob Petrie (Van Dyke), a family man who spent his days at the writers’ table of a TV variety show, where he formed a work family of sorts, and his off time at home
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