Employees' Entrance (Forbidden Hollywood) [VHS]

Employees' Entrance (Forbidden Hollywood) [VHS]
by Roy Del Ruth

Employees' Entrance (Forbidden Hollywood) [VHS]

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Product details

Actor: Alice White, Hale Hamilton, Loretta Young, Wallace Ford, Warren William
Director: Roy Del Ruth
Cinematographer: Barney McGill
Editor: James Gibbon
Producer: Lucien Hubbard
Writer: David Boehm
Writer: Robert Presnell Sr.
Edition: VHS Tape
Format: Black & White, HiFi Sound, NTSC
Running Time: 75 minutes
Release Date: 1998-09-01
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Publisher: MGM (Warner)
Studio: MGM (Warner)

VHS Movie Reviews of Employees' Entrance (Forbidden Hollywood) [VHS]

Movie Review: Brilliant!
Summary: 5 Stars

Warren William at his caddiest, Alice White & Loretta Young at their sexiest (& that is saying something! no woman these days even comes close) in a wonderfully funny cynical story of what competition & success are all about.

Movie Review: Department Store Immorality
Summary: 4 Stars

There are many things that can happen in a large department store. The most influential man in the business (Warren William) grows a reputation for being a cutthroat manager. However, he bends a bit to allow a beautiful out-of-work girl (Loretta Young) become a model at the store. She in turn falls in love with another employee, William's assistant (Wallace Ford), and the two get married. However, William monopolizes Ford's time, causing problems for the newlyweds.

Warren William is effective in his role as an egotistical and evil employer. However, the logic in his lines makes it impossible for the audience to passionately hate him, making the film seem all the more realistic. He looks similar to John Barrymore with a more hardnosed attitude.

Loretta Young is very young and beautiful in this film. Her character is playful and her large eyes are very expressive.

Wallace Ford is emotionally average in this film; he offers nothing outstanding to the role.

Alice White plays a co-starring role as Polly, a flirtatious, sarcastic, plucky girl used to keep other powerful men in the business on William's side. She has the advantage of a sweet, Scarlett O'Hara smile as well as some of the funniest scenes of the film.

This film is a member of the Forbidden Hollywood collection for a few reasons. Not only does it depict a woman using her body to secure a job, but it also entails infidelity and several suicides.

Movie Review: Employees' Entrance: Survival of the Meanest
Summary: 5 Stars

For those Americans who are too young or too uneducated to know the history of this country during the Depression, a film like EMPLOYEES' ENTRANCE is a rude awakening. Times were hard then and Hollywood had to walk a fine line between entertaining an audience that was only too familiar with the horrors of a crumbling economy and not reminding them in such a way that would cause them to stay out of the movie theater. What director Roy Del Ruth accomplished was to maintain this delicate balance by making vicious store manager Kurt Anderson (Warren William) the dramatic center. Anderson is a despicable sort. He is very much what you would expect to emerge at the top of the food chain from a Darwinian pool of store managers. He uses people as if they were disposable tissue. He is tight with a budget, nor is he above taking advantage of a woman too drunk to resist. Yet despite these character flaws, he dominates each scene with a never say die attitude that slowly elevates him into something perilously close to warped admiration. Warren William as a pre-fifties version of George Sanders is exactly right as the cad who nevertheless engages the audience's total attention. Loretta Young is Madeline, the secretly married woman who is drunkenly seduced. Young is the ostensible female lead but it is hard for her to show the bounce that we know she would later exude since Warren William's dastardliness so thoroughly dominates each scene. The relatively unknown Alice White as Polly provides a surprisingly successful counterpoint to William with her own peroxide blond brashness as she recognizes that his arrogance is a lethal mixture of charm and cold menace. Imagine a non-hunchbacked Brooks Brother Richard III proudly and openly boasting of his future villanies and you get an idea of how attractive overt evil can be. If this film had been made just a year or two later after the Hays Code of Morality had kicked in, then what would have resulted would surely have been so deviolenced that syrup and pablum, rather than stark villainy, would have oozed in every frame. EMPLOYEES' ENTRANCE, thankfully retains the power of urgency that stamps this Depression-age movie as one to reckon with.

Movie Review: ZESTY AND HOT.
Summary: 4 Stars

This 1933 film tells of the life of department store employees and its ruthless, amoral manager. Warren William, an actor I never cared much for before seeing this, gives an absolute bravura performance as Kurt Anderson. Solid support comes from 20 year-old Loretta (as Madeline) and, as the blonde flirt Polly, the now-rarely-seen Alice White is fine. The tyrannical William falls for Young, the wife of one of his subordinates: he eventually receives the comeuppance he deserves...Briskly written by Robert Presnell and excellently directed by Roy Del Ruth, this little pre-code flick is gripping, funny and outrageous.

Movie Review: One of the best pre-code films
Summary: 5 Stars

Fast moving, cynical, and brash, this is a delightful Warner Bros. take on the depression.

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