Employees' Entrance



During the bleak era of the Great Depression, film studios scrambled to find various types of "escapist" fare to take people's minds off their hard life struggles and get audiences into theaters: musicals, lighthearted comedies and melodramas with big stars. Employees' Entrance, a superb pre-Production Code film about the machinations in a New York City department store, effectively captures real urban tensions during the Depression. Key is Warren Williams' devastating characterization of the store's general manager, whose system shows not a trace of the smiling manager. He's always superb as a charismatic, shyster professional, is obsessed with being successful, callously dismissing longtime, non-productive employees and demanding that his assistants not succumb to women.

Warner Bros. films of the 1930s are renowned for being fast-paced, quickly made, relatively short features (55-75 minutes) with whip-smart dialogue. Employees' Entrance remains one of the studio's best.

Employees' Entrance was added to the National Film Registry in 2019.