The Power and the Glory

A man’s life is told in retrospect immediately after his funeral. Tom Garner began on the railway as a track walker, rose step by step and finally came to head the company; but over those same years he lost his hold on his family, and by the time he saw it, it was too late. The account gives time not in straight order but in the order it comes to the person remembering, and that structure was sold as a new technique when the film opened. The screenplay of William K. Howard’s seventy six minute American film was Preston Sturges’s first original script; he delivered it as a complete shooting script and took a share of the profits, which was not usual in those years. Spencer Tracy plays Tom Garner and Colleen Moore his wife. It was completed in 1933, and years later it was argued to be a source for the structure of Citizen Kane, though Welles said he never saw it.