Patterns is one more example of a great play written by Rod Serling at the dawn of the Golden Age of Television. It first appeared as a live production of the Kraft Television Theatre series in January, 1955 and enjoyed considerable popular and critical acclaim. It was so well received that this production was repeated--live again--less than a month later. This had never happened before, and is a tribute to the high quality that went into bringing Patterns to the TV viewing audience. Fortunately, the first performance was captured in Kinescope, and is available in a restored version on YouTube.
Richard Kiley, who plays the young executive recently hired to ultimately replace the aging ruthless current CEO, is not well known today. He had a modest film career, but was a well established star on the Broadway stage. Kiley was the original actor who portrayed Cervantes in the classic musical drama Man of La Mancha. Everett Sloane, who portrayed the thoroughly dislikable CEO, has enjoyed great success as a film and TV actor in a wide variety of character roles ranging from Orson Welles's friend and confident Bernstein in Citizen Kane to Rita Hayworth's treacherous husband in The Lady from Shanghai. Ed Begley, Sr. Made a specialty in creating a large number of parts where he became a weak often amoral character who sometimes generated pity and other times scorn. In Patterns, he is the humane but expendable older employee who will be beaten down and passed over by the CEO in favor of the up and coming Kiley character. Begley was a veteran of the stage and screen--whose versatility extended from a lead in Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel on Broadway to playing Debbie Reynolds' vigorous father in the film version of The Unsinkable Molly Brown. The Golden Age Of Television was studded with memorable plays and performances as exemplified by Patterns.
Unfortunately, Kiley was replaced by Van Heflin in the feature film version of Patterns. This might be considered as a stroke of irony for Heflin--who was himself not allowed to recreate his original part of Macauley Connor from the 1939 stage version of The Philadelphia Story for the Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn-George Cukor film version of the play. It went instead to one James Stewart, who earned the 1940 best actor Oscar for his effort! Fortunately, Sloane and Begley were allowed to recreate their original memorable TV roles for the feature film version of Patterns.
Interestingly, Rod Serling revisited some of the plot elements in Patterns for his first season entry of The Twilight Zone seen on 5/6/60 and titled A Stop at Willoughby. In that episode, the Begley character (now called Gart Williams instead of. Andy Sloane and played by James Daly) is so traumatized from his corporate bullying experience and resulting decline in status that he begins to fantasize how to escape from this increasingly unpleasant reality. Serling's solution--a trip for Daly to The Twilight Zone! A Stop at Willoughby is one of the most fondly remembered episodes from the entire classic series--and should be sought out by fans for comparison with the Patterns teleplay of five years earlier.