EMPLOYEES’ ENTRANCE. First National Pictures/Warner Brothers, 1933. Warren William, Loretta Young, Wallace Ford, Alice White, Hale Hamilton, Albert Gran, Ruth Donnelly. Director: Roy Del Ruth.

   While 20 year old Loretta Young is breathtakingly beautiful in this film, star billing rightly goes to Warren William. As Kurt Anderson, the fire-breathing and much hated manager of the Franklin Monroe Department Store, he is the Evil Boss personified, trampling down and firing employees at will who can’t meet his standards, and absolutely cutthroat in his dealings with suppliers who can’t meet their contracted deadlines on time.

   He is on the job 24/7, and anyone who can’t keep pace with him is swept aside like yesterday’s dead leaves. Even the board of directors hates him, including the owner of the store himself, but they can’t fire him. Why? Because in the middle of the Depression, the store makes money.

   Anderson has one flaw, perhaps. He is not married — he doesn’t have time for a wife, he says — but he does have an eye for the ladies. Which is where the enchanting Madeline comes in (Loretta Young). He seduces her, quite frankly so, even though the scene shifts quickly to the following day. Once on the payroll as a model, though, she catches the eye of Wallace Ford, a miniature Kurt Anderson in the making, but as the latter’s newly appointed assistant — the previous having been summarily dismissed as deadwood with no new ideas in years — he can’t ask her to marry him.

   But they do anyway. Get married, that is, and in secret, which means that Madeline must continue to fend off Anderson’s advances, unsuccessfully so, which makes this a somewhat racy comedy as well as a serious romantic drama, one definitely made in the pre-Code era.

   But getting back to Warren William, what he does so well is to play an utter cad, but one with good reasons for doing what he does. Deadwood should be replaced. Standing up to the bankers on the board of directors should be done; all they’re interested in the money coming in, with no effort on their part, at the expense of the workers Anderson would have to let go if he were to retrench and cut back as they advise him and as every other business is doing — and failing as a result.

   Warren William makes us, the viewer admire, if not quite like him, even as we hate him. That’s a tough job for any actor to pull off, and William makes it look easy.