Patterns │ Film Masters
Courtesy of Film Masters
by CHAD KENNERK
Rod Serling’s acid-etched corporate morality tale Patterns is Mad Men meets 12 Angry Men. There’s a lot of corporate anger and resentment across the boardroom. Before The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling wrote Patterns as a live TV play in 1955 for Kraft Television Theatre. It was such a hit that the network reran it just a month later, which was a real rarity back then. United Artists then expanded it into a feature film the next year with the same director, Fielder Cook, and much of the same cast.
Film Masters Archive Collection Blu-ray restores that theatrical version in crisp black-and-white, showing off the sharp cinematography by Boris Kaufman — the cinematographer who shot director Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront and Baby Doll, as well as director Sidney Lumet’s debut 12 Angry Men and Lumet’s The Pawnbroker. Former Film Review contributor Van Heflin plays Fred Staples, an ambitious new executive brought into the insulated corporate world of a Manhattan skyscraper ruled by tyrant Walter Ramsey, played by Everett Sloane. Fred doesn’t realise it, but he’s being groomed to replace older VP Bill Briggs, played by Ed Begley, a man quietly being destroyed by corporate politics.
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Set inside Ramsey & Company’s cold, cathedral-like 40th-floor offices, there’s no score, just the hum of typewriters and the ticking of clocks. Another real rarity for its time, the lack of a soundtrack was a deliberate choice that further highlights the stark, unfeeling corporate ladder. Essentially a Twilight Zone episode that never crosses into the supernatural, the horror is the system itself. It wrestles with ambition vs. empathy and loyalty vs. survival. Looking at corporate culture today, those ideas almost feel quaint, but back then it was startling to see how a company could place capitalism before its people. Patterns demonstrates how the ideals surrounding loyalty and respect in the corporate world were already crumbling.
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Director Fielder Cook shoots the opening vistas of New York like a steel jungle, with some striking low angles of the skyscrapers at Nassau and Pine. Film Masters’ edition arrives from a new 2K scan, and while the print is a little uneven and rough in places, the restoration looks fantastic, and it’s likely the best-looking release to date. Archive Collection Blu-rays from Film Masters do not contain special features but are designed to make lesser-known titles available and help preserve them for history.
Patterns itself isn’t flashy. It’s not sentimental. It’s a study of how power can consume even the decent ones until they start to look just like the boss they hate. Thematically and visually, it feels like a precursor to what Wall Street and The Firm would explore decades later. The TV origins of the story are apparent though, with a lot of single-location monologuing and, frankly, too much boardroom barnstorming. Film Masters Archive Collection Blu-ray gives this forgotten drama a fresh polish and proves Rod Serling didn’t need aliens or time travel to show us monsters.
Patterns is available on Blu-ray 19 August from Film Masters.
Order now at: https://www.filmmasters.com/archive-collection
FILM MASTERS is a consortium of historians and enthusiasts who seek to celebrate the preservation and restoration of films. As archivists, Film Masters is committed to storing film elements for future generations and reviving films that have been sitting dormant for decades. By scanning in 2K and 4K, they give these lesser-known films the red-carpet treatment they deserve. Leveraging modern means of distribution to release forgotten films back into the world, Film Masters also produces original bonus materials—including feature-length documentaries, audio commentaries and historic articles—to contextualise and celebrate these works of art as they were meant to be.
