The Power and the Glory (1933)

The Power and the Glory is a 1933 Pre-Code film starring Spencer Tracy and Colleen Moore, written by Preston Sturges, and directed by William K. Howard. The picture's screenplay was Sturges' first script, which he delivered complete in the form of a finished shooting script, for which he received $17,500 and a percentage of the profits. Profit-sharing arrangements, now a common practice in Hollywood, were then unusual and gained Sturges much attention.

The film, told through flashbacks, was cited by Pauline Kael in her essay "Raising Kane", as a prototype for Citizen Kane. (Screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, who along with Orson Welles won an Oscar for the screenplay of Citizen Kane, was a friend of Sturges.) Tracy's powerful performance in a boardroom scene remains widely considered one of his most thrilling sequences as an actor.

The film was loosely based by Sturges on the life of C. W. Post, his second wife's grandfather, who founded the Postum Cereal Company, which later became General Foods. Like Tom Garner, the lead character in The Power and the Glory, Post worked his way up from the bottom, and ended his own life. Otherwise, according to Sturges, their lives did not correspond.

In 2014, The Power and the Glory was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

The film is unrelated to the 1940 novel of the same title by Graham Greene.

Synopsis

After the funeral service for Tom Garner (Spencer Tracy), a powerful and much-hated railroad tycoon who committed suicide, his best friend Henry (Ralph Morgan) recalls Garner's life, his family problems, and his rise from track walker to president of the railroad.

Actors