NR | 2 h 33 min | Drama | 1956
Tom Rath (Gregory Peck), wife Betsy (Jennifer Jones), and their three children get by on his barely adequate mid-20th-century salary. Betsy’s hankering after a higher quality of life, and his brief but decisive wartime extramarital affair claw at him, triggering a spiral of regret and recrimination. They also trigger his second thoughts about the personal and professional crossroads he faces in his new public relations job, reporting to UBC Broadcasting’s president, Ralph Hopkins (Frederic March).
Screenwriter-director Nunnally Johnson draws on Sloan Wilson’s novel, which examines the employee and his family on one side and the employer and his organization on the other. At issue in this fraught relationship is whether individual interests of consumers, such as those of a husband and father or a wife and mother, should bow to the collective interests of producers, such as manufacturing or services corporations….