The Power and The Glory (1933 Film)

The Power And The Glory (1933 film)

The Power and the Glory is a 1933 film starring Spencer Tracy and Colleen Moore, written by Preston Sturges, and directed by William K. Howard. It was Sturges' first script, which he delivered complete in the form of a finished shooting script, for which he received $17,500 and a percentage of the profits. Profit-sharing arrangements, now a common practice in Hollywood, were then unusual and gained Sturges much attention.

The film, told through flashbacks, was cited by Pauline Kael in her essay "Raising Kane", as a prototyype for Citizen Kane. (Screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, who along with Orson Welles won an Oscar for the screenplay of Citizen Kane, was a friend of Sturges.) Tracy's powerful performance in a boardroom scene is widely considered one of his most thrilling sequences as an actor. The film was loosely based by Sturges on the life of C.W. Post, his second wife's grandfather, who founded the Postum Cereal Company, which later became General Foods. Like Tom Garner, the lead character in The Power and the Glory, Post worked his way up from the bottom, and ended his own life. Otherwise, according to Sturges, their lives did not correspond.

The film is unrelated to the 1940 novel of the same title by Graham Greene.