39: The Hardest Working Man At Hudsucker Industries
There is a certain kind of employee at any organization who serves as one of the many reminders that Capitalism can be a cruel mistress. This employee is one who shows up every day, does their job with startling efficiency, and has done so for years, decades maybe, and who always seems to be passed over for promotions, raises, or other forms of advancement. “It doesn’t matter how well you do your job” capitalism mockingly says to this person. “There are so many factors so beyond your control that determine who actually gets the opportunity, so keep doing your job, child, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll give you a chance next year”
Fourteen minutes into the film’s run time, we have been introduced to the film’s driving plot point, its antagonist Sidney Mussburger, and its protagonist Norville Barnes, yet by this point Barnes has not spoken a single line of dialog. As he is introduced getting off the bus he does not speak as he despondently checks the job board. He does not speak at the diner where he reads the want ads. He does not speak as he walks to the Hudsucker building, and he does not speak for his horrific onboarding. The very first time we hear his voice, he does not speak to anyone, muttering to himself “Kloppitt… Kloppitt… Kloppitt... “ as he searches for the mail slot bearing the name “Max Kloppitt Jr”, the recipient of the first letter Norville has to sort*. As he is confronted with a bureaucratic catch-22, where if he fails to deliver the letter he will not be doing his job but if he folds the envelope to successfully deliver the letter he will likewise not be doing his job, he turns to his neighbor for help.
Norville’s neighbor in the mail room is credited in the script and credits as simply “Ancient Sorter”. He’s played by Patrick Crenshaw, a man who made his career playing old fuddy duddies. Crenshaw got his start in acting later in life, only finding steady work at the age of 40 starting with his role as a security guard in The Amazing Transparent Man (1960). His fuddy-duddy type was aided by his neutral, stern expression, and often augmented by old timey well groomed facial hair. He was a bank teller in a failed bank wearing a neat suit and well groomed mustache who is stuck up by Warren Beatty for chump change in Bonnie and Clyde (1967). By the 70s he was already leaning into his age for his roles, his hair having gone completely white as he played the recurring role of “grandpa” or “old man” in a few episodes of Green Acres between 1970 and 1971, and a grandfatherly western union teller in the wacky Beatles jukebox musical Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978). He was an elderly frat member named “Blue” in the Will Ferrell gross-out comedy Old School (2003), Jennifer Coolidge’s nonverbal husband who apparently “loves soup” in Best In Show (2000), and “Sheriff Bob” in the Air Bud series, being his final role in an appearance in Air Buddies (2006).
In Hudsucker, he briefly converses with Norville Barnes as they work side by side in the mail room, but he also hardly seems to notice him. He sits, flinging envelope after envelope, looking straight ahead as he sorts the mail roughly a hundred times faster than Norville. He does not place the envelopes in their slots, opting to rapidly toss them. Throwing anything made of paper is a particular skill, requiring months of practice, and is a non-obvious way for a mail clerk to do their job, and yet he operates this way without even thinking about it. He seems to not care about Norville or anyone else, seemingly answering his question about what to do when the mail is too big in order to shut Norville up rather than to actually be helpful. He also has a deep seated understanding of the cruel bureaucracy of the Hudsucker organization, in that it’s better for all involved to destroy letters than be seen visibly breaking the rules. After exchanging a few sentences with Norville, the company’s Blue Letter siren sounds. The Ancient Sorter explains the significance of the Blue Letter to Norville “It’s a Blue Letter: top, top level. Confidential communication between the brass. Usually bad news. They hate blue letters upstairs. Hate ‘em!” before disappearing into the shelves of mailboxes, never to be seen again in the film. He understands that the capricious nature of Hudsucker leadership is not above shooting the messenger in the event of receiving a Blue Letter, and so he scrams as he recognizes that delivery of the Blue Letter probably means the poor mailroom clerk will lose their job.
The Ancient Sorter also clearly has seen it all. He is the first person who Norville shows his drawing of a circle to, announcing “take a look at this sweet baby” as he pulls his unlabeled circle from his shoe, causing the Sorter to look in Norville’s direction for the first time. “I developed it myself. Yessirree this is my ticket upstairs” he continues as the Sorter stares at Norville and his drawing blankly. “You know, for kids!” Norville offers as a non-explanation. Someone else might have asked for clarification, or told Norville that his idea was confusing or nonsensical. The Ancient Sorter simply turns back to his task. “Another idiot with another stupid idea he thinks is brilliant” he is no doubt thinking as he tells Norville “terrific”. “So, see, I won’t be working in the mailroom long” Norville says. “No, I don’t guess you will be”, the sorter responds, telling Norville that he believes him, but meaning “this idiot will do something to get himself fired in the next five minutes or so”**
The Hudsucker mailroom is a strange and capricious place. The room itself is dark and cavernous. Hudsucker production designer Dennis Gassner said of the mailroom that it “looks as if it had been designed by Albert Speer”, Speer being a high ranking Nazi party official and architect who was commissioned to create a new Berlin by Adolf Hitler. The relatively short period of time in which the Nazis were in power relative to the amount of time it takes to plan and build a large building means he designed relatively few structures, but one might see a touch of the Hudsucker mailroom in, say, Speer’s “Golden Hall” which was part of the party’s Nuremberg rally grounds
More than cavernous rectilinearity though, one gets the sense that Gassner’s name checking of Albert Speer is more about a malevolent energy brought into the space. Nazis are, after all, bad. The Hudsucker mailroom is dark. It is bustling. Its workers are overworked to the hilt, shoving parcels into a new hire’s face as he’s being onboarded. The signage denoting which shelves belong to which departments as well as Hudsucker Industries overall mail coding system is difficult and inscrutable. It’s too dark to see if it’s clean, so it even feels dirty despite the fact that it probably isn’t. The advertisement Norville reads that leads him to the Hudsucker mailroom advertises “long hours” and “low pay”. It is arguably the worst place in the world to work.
When Norville asks the Ancient Sorter how long he’s worked in the mailroom, he replies instantly “forty-eight years. Next year, they move me up to parcels… if I’m lucky”. He has worked for forty-eight years in possibly the worst job imaginable. Forty-eight years prior to the 1958 in which the film is set was 1910. The architectural style of the Hudsucker building is very clearly Art Deco, bringing to mind buildings like The Empire State Building (construction of which began in 1930), or Rockefeller Center (construction of which began 1931) or indeed, Chicago’s Merchandise Mart where the street level exteriors of Hudsucker Tower were shot (construction of which began in 1928). The Hudsucker building very likely also was built around the same time. We also know of Hudsucker Industries that “Waring Hudsucker built the company with his bare hands” to paraphrase a character named “Elderly Executive” from the scene prior. If Waring Hudsucker is the same age as Charles Durning was when he portrayed him, he would have been 71 when the film starts. If he started Hudsucker Industries straight out of college, when he was 22, say, that would mean the company would have only existed for 49 years. It is very likely the Ancient Sorter was hired to work in the mailroom when Hudsucker was a scrappy little startup, likely being the first mail clerk hired because the company probably didn’t need one for its first year of existence. He was probably the only one for a while, staying with the company as it grew and grew, through two world wars and the great depression, as Hudsucker moved into its new giant midtown Manhattan skyscraper and he was stuffed in its windowless basement. He probably went from simply collecting the mail and personally handing it out to whoever needed it to being beholden to Hudsucker’s inscrutable mail coding system, learning how to toss the letters into their slots before loading them into pneumatic tubes to go God knows where. He has been faithfully executing and killing the job for decades. Patrick Crenshaw’s Okie accent betrays that the Ancient Sorter is likely not a native New Yorker. He likely came to the big city from the prairie, looking to fulfill his big dreams and ambitions, just like Norville, only to find himself spending half a century sorting letters (but doing a bang up job of it).
In the film’s denouement, Moses narrates that Norville “ruled with wisdom and compassion” after the events of the film from 1959 onwards. Here’s hoping he didn’t forget where he came from and finally moved that man up to parcels.
* The joke that Max Kloppitt Jr’s mailbox is half the size of Max Kloppitt’s mailbox is somehow both profoundly stupid and profoundly subtle. Just as Dolly Parton once said “it takes a lot of money to look this cheap” of her own appearance, I would posit that it takes a lot of brains to write a joke that dumb.
** Norville absolutely does something fireable in the next 5 minutes, as he fails to deliver the Blue Letter to Sidney, which the Ghost of Waring Hudsucker later informs him is a fireable offence. One wonders why the board simply didn’t have him fired for failing to deliver the Blue Letter once its contents were revealed rather than Sidney Mussburger contemplating jumping off the building. But that’s for a universe in which a movie like this makes sense.
Patrick Cranshaw will always be Pappy in BUBBLE BOY to me