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The Whistle at Eaton Falls (Louis de Rochemont; Columbia) deals with the thorny issue of labor v. management, a subject rarely touched on the U.S. screen. Filmed in New England, Independent Producer de Rochemont's picture tells of an ugly industrial crisis, with a community's survival at stake. Remarkably, spokesmen for both unions and management agree that it is a good picture. It also deserves the approval of moviegoers as absorbing, provocative entertainment.
Like De Rochemont's Lost Boundaries, the new movie dramatizes its issue shrewdly with a plot twist that thrusts a leading character from one side of the fence to the other, filling him with an inner conflict as sharp as the one that seethes around him. In Lost Boundaries, a college student discovered that he and his family, passing as white, were really Negroes. In The Whistle at Eaton Falls, a workingman (Lloyd Bridges) who heads the local union is catapulted into the tough job of bossing a failing manufacturing company.
Boss Bridges soon learns what his predecessor was up against: the company, being undersold everywhere, can meet competition only by putting in new machines and cutting labor costs. Facing the alternative of watching the plant go out of business (and most of Eaton Falls go out of work), he is forced into decisions that the union opposes bitterly.
Though both movies are based on true incidents, The Whistle is as vulnerable as Lost Boundaries to the charge of oversimplifying its complex issue in terms of a highly specialized case, and arriving too patly at a happy ending. But The Whistle gives sympathetic treatment to the problems of both sides, respects both for good faith and argues effectively that in the long pull, labor and management are in the same boat.
A well-researched script and new faces recruited from Broadway and New England combine with on-the-spot shooting to give most of The Whistle the real-life look of all De Rochemont pictures. Supported by Dorothy Gish, in her first movie in five years, and by the stage's Murray Hamilton, James Westerfield and Lenore Lonergan, Hollywood's Actor Bridges gives his best performance so far. —
Louis de Rochemont, 52, is one producer whose pictures bear the trademark of his own style, no matter who writes or directs them. He builds his movies around a hard core of fact, shoots them in actual settings, weights the casts with unknowns, little-knowns and nonprofessionals, so that the stories will look as if they were filmed while they were happening.
De Rochemont developed his widely copied journalistic style in his nine-year stint as pioneer producer of the MARCH OF TIME. He introduced it to fiction films with 1945's The House on 92nd Street, applied it successfully to 1946's 13 Rue Madeleine, 1947's Boomerang! and his first independent feature, 1949's Lost Boundaries. Also to his credit: World War II's Oscar-winning documentary, The Fighting Lady.