Take This Job and Shove It

Some months back, TCM ran a spotlight on "working class" movies. I did a post on one of the films, The Working Man, already, since it got another airing as part of a later daytime spotlight. Another of the movies was the new-to-me film Take This Job and Shove It. Having watched it, there's a reason this movie was new to me.

Frank Macklin (Robert Hays) is one of those hotshot types in the sort of corporate firm that has hotshots. The corporation is a conglomerate run by Samuel Ellison (Eddie Albert) that buys up troubled businesses, cuts out the deadweight, and turns them around, at least for some values of a turnaround for the people who still have a job at the firm. One of the businesses is a brewery run by Charlie Pickett (Art Carney) and based in Macklin's home town in Iowa. So Ellison decides to send Frank to Iowa to shape up the brewery and get production up so that it can become profitable again.

Frank heads to his old hometown, and when he gets there, everyone is at first happy to see him, since he was the sort of local boy who made good. But it doesn't take long for them to realize that things aren't going to be easy for them. After all, one of the things Frank does to increase production is to take all of the workers and put them in new roles on the production line that they haven't necessarily done before. Understandably, a lot of the assembly line workers aren't happy about it.

Complicating matters is the fact that still living in town is Frank's old girlfriend J.M. Halstead (Barbara Hershey). The see each other, and you can see why they might think about starting up their relationship again. And as the movie goes on, Frank's resuming his old friendships leads him to wonder which side he should be on in the business world. He still has a bond with those old friends, and you can make a cast that there's something to be said for loyalty.

However, the new business practices Frank introduces work to increase production and make the brewery profitable. Profitable enough, in fact, that Ellison thinks about selling the brewery to a rich guy named Hooker (country singer Charlie Rich) who sees the brewery as a sort of vanity project. He's not exactly a good businessman himself, and the brewery workers aren't necessarily thrilled with the idea of becoming employees of Hooker. Frank doesn't like the prospect either.

The idea behind Take This Job and Shove It is a good one, although once again I think it's one of those movies where the premise doesn't exactly work. I suppose it's a bit like Honeysuckle Rose in that it's showing a portion of American society that wasn't normally put up on the big screen. This was, for example, one of the first times that monster trucks broke out into the public consciousness.

It also doesn't help that the print isn't very good. It looks like it was done on videotape, with TV-style direction from director Gus Trikonis, which made me wonder wither Take This Job and Shove It was actually a TV movie. But a look at IMDb says that no, it really was a theatrical release. In any case, the final product is decidedly mediocre.