The Whistle at Eaton Falls

A couple of months back, TCM ran the interesting movie The Whistle at Eaton Falls. I had seen that it was scheduled for a Blu-ray release, but I thought the first time I checked, that release was supposed to come in mid-March. Then I checked again, and thought I saw a late March release date, and in late March saw an April 12 release date. Apparently, it's now listed as getting its release on April 15. But since I watched it over the weekend in anticipation of doing a post today, that's the post you're getting.

The opening titles point out that it's produced by Louis de Rochemont, with a story from real life. Now, apparently I haven't mentioned de Rochemont on the blog before, but a bit of introduction to him should tell you the sort of movie you're going to get. Louis de Rochemont apparently got access to a movie camera in the late 1910s, filming the people and places around him. In the 1930s, he started producing the famous newsreel series The March of Time, which were different from other newsreels, in that they were two reels and focused on one story, rather than about a minute per event as other newsreels did. De Rochemont also used dramatic reconstructions of events, which might be controversial, since that technically makes a lot of the "news" not real.

By the mid-1940s, de Rochemont was interested in producing feature films, with the first being the interesting docudrama The House on 92nd Street. He would go on to produce several more docudramas, as well as movies that were slightly further afield from the docudrama, The Whistle at Eaton Falls being in that latter category.

The setting is Eaton Falls, NH, which is a company town. Well, not quite at the beginning, when it's a two-company town. The titular whistle is on the roof of the Granite State Shoe Co., but thanks to rising prices and the same forces that spelled doom for a lot of the mill towns in New England, the shoe company is forced to shut down, putting a lot of people out of work and leaving Doubleday Plastics as the town's biggest employer by far.

Doubleday is not immune to the same economic pressures that closed down Granite State, and Daniel Doubleday, president of the company, calls in the head of the labor union, Brad Adams (Lloyd Bridges), to discuss the problem. In order to cut costs, Doubleday would like to invest in new capital that will increase productivity, which of course means fewer workers to produce the same output. Doubleday's hope is that this will eventually result in more contracts for lower-priced output, eventually allowing everybody to return to work. But the key word is eventually. There would have to be some layoffs that would hopefully be temporary. Brad points out that the union would have to approve the use of the new machines per the contract, but is going to face trouble. He's got some hotheads in the union like Al Webster (Murray Hamilton). On managment side, there's Doubleday's second-in-command Dwight Hawkins (Russell Hardie), who is notoriously anti-union.

Brad is in a difficult situation. He's the one man in the union that the other workers trust, but the economic pressures should be evident, especially considering the recent closure of the other major employer in town. But things are about to get a whole lot more difficult for Brad. In order to try to drum up business, Mr. Doubleday goes on a business trip to meet with the other side of a major production contract. But the plane crashes, killing Mr. Doubleday. Now, the lawyers and bankers want Mrs. Doubleday (Dorothy Gish) to sell and live a comfortable retirement. She, however, doesn't want that, since she knows it would kill the company and put her fellow townsfolk out of work. So she comes up with a radical and risky idea: make Brad the new general manager at the company!

So now Brad gets to see the other side of business. When he goes to keep the appointment that killed his boss, the factory owner on the other side tells him, what would you do if you were in my position? It's not good news for Brad, but it's the obvious answer. And then there's the bidding for plastic buttons for Navy uniforms, which is a brutal process with the low bidder getting the contract period.

Finally, when all seems lost, Brad gets a brilliant idea: have the plastic cutter be part of the same machine as the molder, a process heretofore done by hand because nobody's been able to overcome the technical difficulties. Somehow, he and his assistants are successful. But the companie he's going to sell to has hired Hawkins on, and Hawkins figures out what's going on. So he's going to go to Eaton Falls to rile up the union to get them to reject the deal, so that Doubleday can go out of business and his new company can buy up the machines cheaply.

The Whistle at Eaton Falls is an interesting story, albeit one that seems like a junior high level of sophistication in dealing with complicated issues. Brad Adams gets to see both sides of the problem and finds that -- golly gee, management is just as difficult as labor! Everybody is also either a little too good or a little too bad. But it's a fairly unique story for Hollywood of that period, and it's helped by location shooting and capable acting, not just from Bridges, but many of the supporting stars, some who would go on to a lot bigger things. Anne Francis has a small role as the daughter of one of Brad's older co-workers, while playing one of Brad's co-workers and friends is Ernest Borgnine a couple of years before he became a star.