“Patterns finds Van Heflin, newly arrived from Mansfield, Ohio where Everett Sloane’s corporation has just bought out the factory where he was the plant manager. Sloane was impressed enough with Heflin to take him along to New York and make him a member of his company’s board of directors. Vice President Ed Begley was impressed with Heflin’s abilities as well and befriends him.
What Heflin doesn’t realize is that he’s the object of a corporate power play. Sloane is hard driving, ruthless executive usually in the kind of role Ed Begley plays. For once Ed Begley is a nice guy in a film. He’s a decent soul unlike Sloane, but he’s past his best years. Sloane doesn’t want to fire him, just demean him enough so he’ll quit. Begley’s loyalties to the company stem from when Sloane’s father ran the business and he can’t see life beyond it.
All this comes out at the first board meeting that Heflin attends and later at a party that he and wife Beatrice Straight throw for the board members. Heflin is a confused man, caught between liking and admiring Begley and sadly knowing his future lies with Sloane.
A number of films were made in these years about corporate connivings at the top. Patterns can hold its own with any of them and that list would include Executive Suite, The Power And The Prize, Cash McCall, and B.F.’s Daughter in which Van Heflin co-starred with Barbara Stanwyck.
Patterns was originally a television drama and one of the best early scripts done by Rod Serling. Begley and Sloane repeated their roles, movie name Heflin was substituted for Richard Kiley. The filming still betrays its photographed teleplay origins, but the players more than compensate for the deficiencies there.
For a good look at how we saw corporate America in the Eisenhower years you can’t do much better than Patterns or any of the other films I mentioned.”
… or at least a significant time for many people in a land … or indeed in the west … is often not from one of the classical schools … although the Water Music of Haendel certainly did mark an occasion … but more popular songs of our era, e.g. Vera Lynn’s 1939 “We’ll Meet Again” or Ben Selvin’s 1930 “Happy Days Are Here Again” were certainly milestone markers for many.
The Sound of Music and My Fair Lady most certainly defined the 50s. The three below, in their own way, marked 1968/9, 1974 and 1982 … for me … momentous changes in fortune, momentous changes in society … plus, in watching them in YT reaction videos, where the reviewers were maybe late 20s to 30 something … I chose three which really grabbed many of the young watchers, stunned them in some ways.
But there was one other factor for lil ole me, myself, I … I’ve more than once listed elements I enjoy in any given song, really needing those elements in there … one of those being in jazz … a flurry near the end, followed by an abrupt end to the recorded song … that does lift a 20s song in my eyes.
Another stylistic element for me is that, about a minute and a half to two minutes before the end, the whole song changes up, drops the neat lyrics and choruses and just goes instrumental, seemingly with no limits … almost jamming … that is so nice … and all three of these have such endings.
But even more than that, coming full circle in this post … there were highly significant events occurring in and around the release of the song … events both outside in society, plus in my life. Though I quite like the songs in themselves, I’d not call them my faves … and yet they … well let me put it this way …
… in the first, by Tommy James, have a glance at the stats … over 50 million views, plus 19K comments. I dare say some of Swift Trailer might get those stats … so be it, different world today. In late 1968, early 1969, I was coming off two very close encounters with the female of the species since late 1966 which really knocked me about as a young lad and set the pattern for the rest of my life. Way too early for such things and my attitude today to the female, despite some bad ones ruining it … well you see it in my writing.
”Now I don’t hardly know her” … “when she come walking over”. That’s exactly how it happened.
Time frame? The Beatles had gone LSD, the Stones were psychedelic and spacy, drugfest and indiscriminate sex Woodstock was still some time ahead.
Right … second song … May 1974 was a major time in music … after the psychedelic 60s, the bland (in my eyes), pompous “prog rock”, pre-punk and at the end of the decade … ska … but at the same time, folk had gone electric, troubadours were still about but in a different way … artists still highly personalised in their music … sort of Donovan Catch the Wind continued … Jackson Browne was one of those although, as with Leonard Cohen, some saw it as music to slash your wrists by.
In my life, it was a stormy period where I’d lost the plot, it was the wild yoof period and in the middle of it came the steadying influence of a woman this time, not a girl … there were still plenty of soaring highs and plummeting lows to go.
This song is renowned for the fiddle of David Lindley, inseparable from pianist JB … and once again … that change up within sight of the end which completes the whole. But the theme too … it’s exactly today’s theme … before the deluge late 2025/early 2026:
The third and final song, again, had that two minute change up ending which really completed it, with intense, passionate guitar, which quite fitted the mad world after my dad died. It became a flurry of females, out of which came some interesting times until the late 80s … this could be termed my family period, though that diminishes the value of each human involved. Plus I was in fulltime work the entire time. Had to … just to afford it.
One thing I’d learnt was that anything a man does can be wrong in his female’s eyes if she wants to take offence … it’s part and parcel of the game I suppose … she needs lively, volcanic, he needs calm and consolidating. The song is perfect for that theme:
… plus a meeting at 12 noon, east coast time, between Donny and Robert Jnr … that is a crucial thing to watch. If Donny remains blockheaded, against all recent evidence, plus past … he will lose immense support.
(0601) Morning all, just up now. Sunny so far. Warning, reader … there is some rough copy below. (0707)
5. Most women pundits I’ve seen so far are appalled
… like Michelle here:
What concerns me most in these things … and please do judge me on my record at NO/UHC since the pizza post, is an old cartoon meme from many decades ago on the Linda Lovelace porn film in theatres, which had an older couple, respectably dressed, outside the theatre being interviewed. The caption went something like: “It was nothing but filth, presented for no more than prurient titillation, it was gross … we loved it.”
This is the Mary Whitehouse argument … to go on about how bad something is … usually it means having wallowed in it first with a tut-tut expression on the face and outrage in the heart. If Michelle D is being honest above, then well done that girl.
Then there is the “cannot be unseen” factor … suddenly it’s dropped on you without warning … some of the “rightwing” online media, never the left Guardian or whatever, runs a brief clip in ad space of BB going into the room, then a snap of her on hands and knees, a la Cackler Harris, and that’s it … the rest is up to the disapproving prurient.
4. Steve at 1128
DOJ Offers $50 Million Reward for Information Leading to Arrest of Venezuela’s Dictator Maduro
US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy Announces 1,500 Trucks Taken Off the Road Because Drivers Didn’t Speak English
VP Vance Warns UK Foreign Secretary Lammy: Do Not Go Down ‘Very Dark Path’ of Censorship
Bondi Appoints Ed Martin as Special Prosecutor to Investigate Schiff and Letitia James
Kyiv Ramps Up Strikes Ahead of Summit as Russia Advances Across All Fronts
Global firestorm erupts over UK’s Online Safety Act: Free speech under siege as democracy faces digital Downing Street
Ken Paxton opens probe into whether Soros-funded PAC funded Dems
Much more.
3. Warning, readers, that this one’s nasty
It’s old, revisited, the usual claim with no further direct evidence except from the multitude of sources westwide since about this type of thing … and who’s going to miss one latina child, thinks Them.
“Professor Joan Donovan is frequently wheeled out by the New York Times as an ‘expert’ on misinformation across a whole range of fields. Paul Thacker at the Disinformation Chronicle exposes her as a shoddy Left-wing activist with a fancy title. Here’s an excerpt.
A funny thing happened when the New York Times reported a month back that Elon Musk’s exit from DC politics had been facilitated by a group of activists targeting his electric car company after he abandoned Democrats, helped fund Trump’s election and then ran DOGE.”
1. DAD at 1128
a) Britain braces for a weekend of protest anarchy: Hundreds of Palestine Action supporters will defy threat of mass arrests as more demos are held outside migrant hotels.
b) The Polish media is awash with allegations that money from a multi-billion euro EU fund has been spent on luxuries such as yachts and saunas.
c) The Spanish town of Jumilla, located in the southeastern region of Murcia, has become the first municipality in Spain to explicitly ban Islamic religious festivities from being held in public spaces.
