Though he earned his two Oscars for musicals, director Robert Wise dabbled in a slew of genres across his long career. With 1954’s Executive Suite, Wise trained his eye on workplace politics.

Tredway Corporation president Avery Bullard (Raoul Freeman) drops dead in the middle of New York City due to a stroke. This soon leads to questions of who will succeed him at his job.

The deceased Bullard left no indication who he would want to succeed him, so the board at Tredway needs to sort through the candidates. As various parties vie for the position, they resort to cutthroat ways.

Bullard dies at the movie’s very start, and as soon as this happens, we see others use his passing – which they literally witness – to scheme for financial advantage. In addition, a thief steals Bullard’s wallet from the corpse on the street.

Suite appears to announce its intentions from the start. The film will deliver a dark and cynical look at the corporate world.

Or so I hoped based on that introduction. Suite comes with the bones of a film that’ll expose the cruelty and selfishness at the heart of big business.

And at times the movie does go down that path. However, Wise puts too much of Suite in “Capra Mode” for it to feel as hard-hitting as I anticipated.

Not that Suite lacks any of the skullduggery I expected. Characters do work against each other to promote themselves.

Still, the whole thing feels more “gentlemanly” than it probably should. A blurb on the back of this Blu-ray’s case promises something a lot more cutthroat than the end product delivers.

And more slow-paced. 34 minutes – or a little more than one-third – of the movie’s running time passes before the Tredway VPs even learn of Bullard’s death, so the competition takes a while to launch, much less really develop.

Some of that 34 minutes offers useful character information, but I think Suite shoehorns in too many extraneous female characters. Yeah, these may humanize the men in some ways, but they make the end product closer to family melodrama than boardroom battle.

The Capra side of things mainly comes via our main role, VP Don Walling (William Holden). He takes on an idealistic POV related to Tredway that his more money-obsessed colleagues don’t necessarily share.

Which is where the Capra vibe enters. Walling exists to promote Good Old American Values in the face of corporate conniving.

And I don’t argue against that message. God knows we could use it, especially in today’s Profits Uber Alles business climate.

However, the Capra tone just doesn’t fit this story all that well. With that cynical opening, Suite feels like a movie that wants to focus on corporate backstabbing but had the rough edges sanded off along the way.

Perhaps I can’t appreciate the final product as much as I’d like because the actual movie conflicts so much with my expectations. Nonetheless, I think Suite just seems surprisingly dull and without much real drama.

Executive Suite appears in an aspect ratio of 1.75:1 on this Blu-ray Disc. Expect yet another solid Warner Archive release.

Sharpness looked consistently positive. A few shots showed a little softness, but those remained modest, as the majority of the flick displayed nice clarity and accuracy.

Neither jagged edges nor moiré effects created concerns, and the presence of natural grain implied the absence of heavy-handed digital noise reduction. Print flaws failed to appear, so this remained a clean image.

Blacks appeared dark and deep, while shadows demonstrated nice smoothness and definition. All in all, the movie looked very good.

With the film’s DTS-HD MA monaural soundtrack, we got an era-appropriate affair. Speech seemed slightly metallic but the lines were easily intelligible and didn’t suffer from edginess or other concerns.

Effects appeared clean and acceptably accurate, though they didn’t get much to do in this chatty affair. The film also lacked a score. Given the age of the material and its subdued ambitions, the audio worked fine.

A few extras appear here, and we get an audio commentary from filmmaker Oliver Stone. He provides a running, screen-specific look at story/characters, cast and performances, crew and filmmaking elements, how the movie impacted his Wall Street and his general thoughts about the flick.

At times, Stone's experiences as a director and a movie lover allow him to provide some useful notes. However, he really leans toward an appreciation of the film and how much he loves it.

Stone also tends to simply narrate the tale and he also goes MIA on too many occasions. Although Stone occasionally makes this an interesting commentary, he just doesn't provide enough positive content to sustain a feature-length chat.

In addition to the film’s trailer, we get two vintage shorts. The set features the live-action Do Someone A Favor (9:02) and the animated Hic-cup Pup (6:23).

Favor provides a comedy in the Pete Smith line that features a hapless man whose efforts to help out others backfire. Like others in the Pete Smith series, it comes with minor laughs but it never becomes particularly amusing.

Pup brings a Tom and Jerry reel in which Spike the dog threatens bodily harm to Tom if he continues to disturb his young son’s slumber, a situation Jerry tries to milk. It becomes reasonably clever at times.

Though I know it enjoys a positive reputation, Executive Suite tends to leave me cold. It leans too far toward family melodrama and too little related to corporate skullduggery. The Blu-ray provides very good picture as well as positive audio and mediocre supplements. I hoped to really like the film but found moderate disappointment.