The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956, Nunnally Johnson) (Patreon)

84/100

Still quietly gobsmacking. I hereby nominate this as the greatest golden-age Hollywood film that has no reputation to speak of (among cinephiles, anyway), edging out fellow '50s Gregory Peck vehicle The Big Country (which at least has the advantage of a familiar name in the director's chair; Johnson made his name primarily behind the typewriter). A skim of Letterboxd reviews suggests that more people have been discovering Grey Flannel Suit lately, citing it as a key influence on Mad Men (still three years in the future when I first/last encountered the film, during Lincoln Center's 2004 Jennifer Jones retro); its sophistication is of a different sort, though, and I now suspect that part of what makes it so oddly distinct is Johnson's stubborn refusal to streamline Sloan Wilson's source novel (which I haven't read, so this is pure speculation). This sucker sprawls, encompassing way more than can comfortably fit even in a 2½-hour feature. One could justifiably call the result ungainly—WWII flashbacks are lengthy enough to make you forget about the story proper; Frederic March's character suddenly shows up halfway through and practically becomes a second protagonist—but the combination of macro structural recklessness and micro dramatic exactitude creates something uniquely exciting, and Johnson improbably does manage to bring it all home by the end. At a glance, Gray Flannel Suit looks irredeemably middlebrow, the American Beauty of its day (albeit without any of the smugness and knee-jerk cynicism that mars that film). But there's genuinely harrowing stuff happening underneath all the placidity. 

Rather than tackle every aspect of the movie's efforts to encapsulate the unspoken malaise of suburban family men / corporate drones, I'm gonna confine myself to how it begins, which is plenty extraordinary in the least showy way imaginable. After a brief scene on a commuter train, establishing that Tom Rath (Peck) is having financial difficulties, our paterfamilias arrives home, greets his wife, Betsy (Jones) and three small children. Ordinary scene-setting, except that death gets mentioned so many times in the first seven minutes of this ostensibly homey idyll that Tom actually asks Betsy "What we got around here, a bunch of necrophiles?" Johnson then underlines this visually with a shot of Tom taking a phone call in the hallway, the most notable compositional element of which is a doll that's been left lying face down on the staircase banister. No actual attention is ever drawn to this (I fully expected Tom to pick it up in annoyance as he left the room, which would be the standard method of making sure we don't miss it; doesn't happen)—it's just echoing the previous morbidity and symbolizing the bad news that Tom receives over the phone. We're still less than eight minutes into the film at this point, with opening credits.

What happens next is even more startling to me, while also being almost provocatively ordinary. Tom relays the bad news to Betsy: A chunk of money they believed that they'd recently inherited doesn't in fact exist. This precipitates an argument about their situation that eventually turns rather ugly, with Betsy telling Tom that he has no guts and that she's ashamed of him. Which is the point at which virtually every other Hollywood film of that era—and, really, just about every indie film of this era—would either (a) continue the argument or (b) cut away to something else (other characters, the next day, whatever). More likely a slow fade or a dissolve than a cut, back then. Instead, Tom chooses not to reply, and then they just both stew in their mutual discomfort for several minutes. He goes upstairs to deal with the kids. She continues fixing dinner. When they share the kitchen, they pointedly ignore each other. And it doesn't get resolved. Or, no—it does get resolved. Betsy picks Tom up at the train station, and as they drive home, she leans her head on his shoulder and says "I'm awfully sorry about last night." But the argument occurs about 15 minutes into the film, and the rapprochement occurs, I kid you not, 54 minutes into the film, following multiple lengthy flashbacks showing us that Tom had an affair and fathered a child in Italy during the war (plus a bunch of scenes in which Tom lands a new lucrative but soulless job). And if you think that's not gonna lead to nearly unbearable ugliness later, think again.

That's a lotta words for me to barely make a dent in enumerating Gray Flannel Suit's singular qualities. I haven't mentioned that we never get the slightest sense of Tom and Betsy's kids, who after the opening sequence and their constant prattle aboout death are only ever seen staring zombie-like into the TV screen, absorbed by screen violence. (Possibly my single favorite moment: Tom sends them to bed and then gets sucked into the violent images himself, slowly sinking into an armchair as the screen fades to black.) There's a whole complicated and remarkably bitter subplot about the elderly man (Joseph Sweeney, 12 Angry Men's kindly juror #9, not so kindly here) who'd taken care of Tom's grandmother until her recent death and unexpectedly produces a signed document leaving her entire estate, including the house, to him (which, if true, would leave Tom's family homeless); amusingly, this subplot also features Lee J. Cobb, 12 Angry Men's juror #3, as one of the wiliest judges in cinema history. The movie plunges waist-deep into the ethical/social/professional quagmire that is its characters' lives and refuses, at least until the requisite happy ending (which is still pretty damn bittersweet), to offer an easy solution. Has any classic Hollywood movie featured so many instances of its protagonist expressing not just momentary uncertainty but implacable doubt? Virtually every third line Peck speaks is "I don't know," or words to that effect. Like The Big Country, this is a big, lumbering prestige drama that often feels downright experimental. If you can conceive of an interesting Stanley Kramer joint, that's kind of what Gray Flannel Suit is like.