Time and motion studies were all the rage in the 1950’s, and fear rippled through various industries at the thought of every motion being analyzed for optimization. The Battle of the Sexes is 1960 British comedy which addresses that concern, though in an unusual, and sometimes deeply unpleasant, manner.
For one thing, there’s that title, which should have one immediately wondering what it has to do with business efficiency. That’s because American business analyst Constance Cummings is, well, a woman, and I guess it just won’t do have a woman tell the menfolk how to do their jobs better. This element introduces an uncomfortable theme of misogyny to what should be a light and mildly satirical film.
The establishment where she finds her expertise applied is a Scottish tweed concern which has been doing things in very set manners for quite a long time. The “factory” is people operating out of isolated cottages in the Hebrides. I can’t imagine them commuting in to work in Edinburgh from any of those distant islands. The accounts are in ledgers arranged seemingly haphazardly in stacks reaching up to the ceiling, though Martin (Peter Sellers), the head accountant can find any document within those in a very short time.
Though it isn’t mentioned in the dialogue, there is the likely inability anybody else will understand this system should something happen to him. Cummings is onto something when she describes the rows of old desks with men behind them, writing with nibbed pens, that it is “like something out of Dickens”.
I can even imagine owner Ernest Thesinger as somebody who would excel in the role of Scrooge, though the dying man is quite affable here. Or, as he puts it, “The great weaver himself is calling for me.” He demands Sellers pour a dram for him and that he himself have one. Sellers never drinks, though it briefly looks like he will acquiesce on this occasion, if only to please the old man. Thesinger is pleased to see Sellers thinks better of it: “Man is fallible but Martin is not.” This foreshadows the extent to which Sellers is set in his ways.
That second drink spirits him away to the great weaver, and son Robert Morley returns to take his place at the head of the firm. Morley is affable but flighty, and not well-regarded by the men of the firm. And I do mean men, as they only woman employed there cleans and serves tea.
When Morley meets Cummings on the train, he insists she come improve the tweed company’s operations. The men resent her immediate recommendations for change even more than they resent Morley. Consider this exchange between Cummings and Sellers: “You’ve heard of time and motion studies, but I’m not sure how that applies here.“ “There is a great deal of time here, but little motion.”
Inevitably, pens and ink wells are replaced by adding machines. An intercom system is installed. Sellers proceeds to sabotage every innovation, such as ordering one time clock for each employee instead of one for all workers. He sneaks into the offices after hours and switches the settings for all the intercoms, which results in a rather humorous bit in which everybody ends up calling somebody other than whom they intended. Sellers also somehow sabotages the adding machines, making them spit out bizarre totals, something which pushes the movie across a line into farce.
The last straw for him will be cummings insisting they switch to using synthetic fibers. At this point, the film makes an odd and unwelcome turn into black comedy as Sellers visits her apartment and makes multiple attempts to kill her. Even if those attempts are unsuccessful, this entire (and lengthy) portion of the film left a bad taste in mouth. I say that even when many of the best gags are in this sequence.
What feels so uncomfortable about this third act is an ugliness under the surface of the picture the entire time, and that is whether the offense is somebody trying to modernize a place rich with tradition or that the person instigating those changes is female. I came away with the impression it is the latter, especially since the title of the movie is The Battle of the Sexes.
There is a potentially better movie here, and at least half of the improvements could have been from discarding the sexist elements. Then it could have been more of an exploration of how monstrous rampant modernization can be, while also getting rid of such unacceptable elements as employee Roddy McMillan’s constant drinking while on the job.
As it stands, the ickiness of the film seems to foretell some social issues as the time in which I write this, where women are being encouraged to leave the workforce and return to what are regarded as traditional roles in the home. As Sellers says to Cummings, when he has mistaken her as the fiancée of Morley: “A man in business needs a woman in the home.” Funny how most of the smartest and hardest-working people I have known in my professional career have been women, and it would be a huge loss to those employers if they had not been there.
I also find myself in a time where America believes it can return to an allegedly simpler time where manufacturing was the dominant industry, but I believe that electric car left the garage a long time ago, gone to other part of the world, and it ain’t coming back. With that, I find it odd the tweed company as it is portrayed here, with its long-standing traditions of painfully slow manufacture, would probably find more success today than it did then. They could just pay a couple of influencers and they money would roll right in—except, that money would probably be crypto. I will them luck accounting for that in their ledgers.
Dir: Charles Crichton
Starring Peter Sellers, Robert Morley, Constance Cummings
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray