The Power and the Prize (M-G-M), like Executive Suite and Patterns, starts out as if it were really going to explain the difference between the American Way of Life and the Normal Course of Business.
Unfortunately, the story goes on a bromide jag.
"What's necessary for Amalgamated," Tycoon Burl Ives harrumphs as the story gets going, "is necessary for her!" Actor Ives is Amalgamated, her is his niece, and the man he is speaking to is Robert Taylor, vice chairman of the board. What the boss is trying to say is that Taylor, who is about to amalgamate with Little Miss Amalgamated, had better go to London first and tie up that $40 million deal with Carew, Ltd. "Believe me, Cliff," says Industrialist Ives with deep feeling, "the men who saved the world were never stopped by the Ten Commandments." Cliff replies with equally deep feeling: "I hope the day will come, sir, when I can be as truthful as that." Off he goes, looking smug, to save the world for the stockholders.
The next part of the picture is apparently intended to suggest that a businessman's profit is apt to be without honor, especially in another country; that it is, in effect, bad diplomacy and even worse business to make a dollar and lose a friend. Perhaps no one will argue the point, but every American is entitled to resent the way the point is made. Scriptwriter Robert Ardrey, who worked from the novel by Howard Swiggett, unfortunately felt obliged to revive an ancient canard that has been a dead duck for a long time. Americans, the script suggests, are rich but vulgar; Europeans are poor but cultured.
Hero Taylor, at any rate, has a mighty appetite for humble pie. Every time the Englishman (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) gives him the time of day, the American lowers his eyes and smiles shyly, as if filled with gratitude and the sense of his own unworthiness. And when he meets the European Woman (Elisabeth Mueller). the young wolf of Wall Street stands there with his tail between his legs, like an Iowa farm boy suddenly confronted with Madame de Staël. The lady is obviously intelligent, or so the scriptwriter seems to think, because she never stops talking. She must be cultured because she pounds incessantly on a piano. And she has certainly known life because—as she informs the hero in the first few minutes of their acquaintance—she was naturally against Hitler, and spent three years in a concentration camp. The implication is that the average American girl could be considerably improved by the regular application of a rubber truncheon. Some may agree, but the heroine of this picture is not much of an advertisement for the method. Essentially, she is just one more gabby, opinionated woman, and whether from Pilsen or Pawtucket, she seems a bit of a bore.
Anyway, Taylor takes her home and together they undertake to save American Big Business from a danger that has not seriously threatened it for a generation: the reign of the robber baron. For a while Taylor has to suffer an angry case of Ives, but in the end everybody agrees that "when power comes to exist for itself, it becomes a losing proposition."