Tom: I don’t know anything about public relations.īill: Who does? You’ve got a clean shirt and you bathe every day. When a fed-up Betsy encourages Tom to strive for success she can be proud of, he takes his fellow commuter Bill up on the chance to interview for a PR gig at a broadcasting conglomerate. The Raths try to maintain faith in “hope and the breaks” coming their way, but the hits keep coming, from a broken washing machine to a potentially worthless family estate.

Despite his low pay as a nonprofit foundation writer, his family’s dwindling finances, and domestic concerns like his daughter’s chicken pox, Rath seems content with the honest life he shares with his wife Betsy (Jennifer Jones) and their family in suburban Connecticut.

Our man in gray flannel is Tom Rath, a 33-year-old Army veteran and father of three who we meet on the same day that the Brooklyn Dodgers clinch their first World Series win. The title has become shorthand for the quintessential cog in the corporate machine, the quietly discontented “organization man” proudly serving the interests of his company for eight hours a day, not including his two-hour commute to and from the suburbs where he puts in appearances behind the white picket fence as a stern father to his 2.3 children, swapping out his suit jacket and tie for a cardigan and martini while comfortably repressing any lasting impacts of his war service a decade earlier. In addition to its contemporary impact on writers like Richard Yates who deconstructed the same themes in his 1962 novel Revolutionary Road, the story was a major influence on Matthew Weiner as he created Mad Men, centered around a mysterious ad man balancing his demanding job, suburban family, and wartime secrets in mid-century America. Nunnally Johnson wrote and directed an adaptation that was released in theaters less than 10 months after the novel first hit bookshelves. Sloan Wilson’s novel was an immediate hit upon its publication in 1955, breaking down the myth of the American Dream while the rest of America was being told they were living it.

Like Peck’s earlier film Twelve O’Clock High (1949), The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit explored the enduring trauma of World War II, still a relatively undiscussed subject during the postwar economic boom, a boom powered by-as the film theorizes-the soul-crushing “rat race” of the modern American corporate structure that threatened fathers’ roles in the families so touted by the era’s norms.

New York City and suburban Connecticut, Fall 1955īorn 105 years ago today on April 5, 1916, Gregory Peck enjoyed one of his most celebrated-and notably tailored-performances in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Nunnally Johnson’s 1956 adaptation of the Sloan Wilson novel of the same name. Gregory Peck as Tom Rath, hardworking business writer haunted by his war service Gregory Peck as Tom Rath in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956) Vitals

The man in the gray flannel suit book