Patterns Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

Patterns Blu-ray Movie Review

Corporate Jungle

Reviewed by Michael Reuben October 1, 2016

Patterns has an unusual history. Like Marty, which is a better known film because of Ernest Borgnine's Oscar-winning lead performance, Patterns was originally written as a one-hour teleplay for live TV, where it debuted as an episode of Kraft Television Theater in January 1955. The broadcast was so well received that NBC repeated it four weeks later—and in those days of live telecasts, repeating a show meant performing it all over again. A feature film appeared the following year, with the same director and much of the same cast. The author of this surprise success was a young TV writer named Rod Serling, future creator of The Twilight Zone, for whom Patterns was a career breakthrough.

Patterns was distributed theatrically by United Artists, but the film fell into the public domain as a result of disputes among its producers. The Film Detective, which specializes in PD releases, has created a new transfer from the print in its library, which it is releasing on BD-R.

Patterns charts the career odyssey of a production engineer named Fred Staples (Van Heflin), who is recruited from the tool-and-dye plant he runs in Ohio to join Ramsey & Company, an industrial conglomerate headquartered in New York. Much of the film is set in the Wall Street offices of Ramsey & Company, with its formal and rigidly stratified office culture that makes the early days of Mad Men seem relaxed and carefree by comparison. In this world, the female staff fetch coffee, take dictation and keep their thoughts to themselves, although it isn't hard to read what Marge Fleming (Elizabeth Wilson) is thinking. Having spent many years as the faithful secretary to an aging executive, Bill Briggs (Ed Begley), who is just returning from sick leave, Marge senses danger in the hiring of Staples, and her suspicions are confirmed when she is unceremoniously transferred from her long-time boss to the new hire.

Staples is a modest man accustomed to running a small operation where he can get his hands dirty and know everyone by name. He recognizes a similar temperament in Briggs, who is his immediate superior and to whom the new man looks for guidance. But it quickly becomes apparent that Briggs's position is precarious, as he is berated and belittled by CEO Walter Ramsey, who is the son of the company's founder but clearly intends to chart a new direction for a new age. (Ramsey is played with focused intensity by Everett Sloane, who portrayed a much more relaxed company chairman in Citizen Kane.) It isn't long before Ramsey tells his new hire what many of the staff already suspect: that Staples has been hired to replace Briggs, whom Ramsey intends to force out the door.

Patterns is filled with tense exchanges about the minutia of acquisitions, deadlines and reports, but Serling's script invests all of them with pregnant subtext about the pressures and perils of competition in the executive suite. Director Fielder Cook (A Big Hand for the Little Lady) and his skilled cast never let you forget the stakes, as Heflin's Staples struggles to reconcile his principles with his ambition. With his loyal wife, Nancy (Beatrice Straight), clearly delighted at the couple's relocation to a beautifully furnished suburban house provided by Ramsey & Company, Staples feels the pressure both at home and at work. Few films have so effectively captured the stress of the gnawing dread that accompanies climbing the corporate ladder.

If there's a criticism to be leveled against Patterns, it's that Serling's resolution of Staples' dilemma is artificially neat and tidy, but his approach does enable a memorable showdown between the conscience-stricken Staples and the ruthless Ramsey. Rarely is the line between combat and negotiation so blurred.

Patterns Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Patterns' black-and-white photography was shot by Boris Kaufman, the Oscar-winning cinematographer of On the Waterfront. With one major exception discussed below, the print used by Film Detective as a source for this 1080p, AVC-encoded BD-R is in quite good shape. It has its share of dirt and scratches, but they are minor and not a distraction from the drama. Both the print and the scan are of sufficient quality to capture the interiors of Ramsey & Company with the realism for which Kaufman's work was known, with reasonably detailed representations of the offices, meeting rooms and long hallways dotted with secretarial desks. The most obvious mark of the film's public domain status is the grain structure, which is rougher and chunkier than it would be if the source were a well-preserved fine-grain master positive instead of a print. Still, good black levels and fine delineations of gray bring out the best that one could hope from a public domain source.

A few scenes are noticeably softer than others (e.g., the conversation in a bar between Staples and his wife near the film's end), but this is no doubt a source issue. In general, Patterns looks remarkably good for a PD presentation, and Film Detective has maintained that level of quality by mastering the disc with a high average bitrate of 33.48 Mbps and a capable encode. The video score attempts to balance the limitations of the transfer against the challenges of the source.

Patterns Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Patterns' original mono soundtrack has been encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0, and the mix is striking for the complete absence of any score. The audio consists of dialogue and sound effects, with the latter occasionally amplified for effect. Film Detective presumably used the optical track from the print in their library, and it has been cleaned of any pops, clicks or excessive hiss (although some hiss remains). The dialogue is almost always clearly articulated, with the striking exception of the film's end (beginning at around time mark 1:21:49), where voices suddenly acquire a hollow, muffled quality. Since this is most pronounced in the same scene noted in Video where the image softens, I suspect this is a source issue.

Patterns Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The disc has no extras.

Patterns Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

While Patterns was successful on TV, it made little impact at the box office, where it was overshadowed by a flashier exploration of similar themes, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which Fox released just two weeks later. The film holds up today, even though modern corporate culture is more fluid, informal and inclusive (at least on the surface). The competition for advancement that Serling dissected so expertly may take different forms, but it hasn't gone away. Despite some flaws, Film Detective's Blu-ray is the best version we're likely to get and is, therefore, recommended.