Hudsucker Industries, THE HUDSUCKER PROXY (1994)
The Coen brothers, being involved in the film industry, have gotten quite adept at portraying powerful and sinister men in high places. And they don’t get much more powerful (or higher — forty-four floors, or forty-five if you count the mezzanine) than Sidney Mussburger. Paul Newman’s cigar-chomping, calculating executive wants to assume control of Hudsucker Industries (best imagined as the Wham-O Corporation if it managed to take over the world), but he can’t do it unless the comically compliant board holds on to the majority of its shares. To ensure that happens, he needs a sap to take over the presidency of the company and run it into the ground, and finds one in the sincere-but-doltish Norville Barnes. Aside from the greediness of their board of directors, Hudsucker Industries’ evil nature is best portrayed in the ridiculously strict policies in their mailroom, their shady accounting practices (as seen in this clip), and the fact that they seem to employ Satan to repaint their office windows.
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