I’ve been a movie fanatic all my life (including childhood), and yet I never got around to seeing Fielder Cook and Rod Serling‘s Patterns until last weekend. And it’s an exceptionally good film — tough, hard, finely sculpted and very well acted (especially by the three leads — Van Heflin, Ed Begley, Everett Sloane). It’s about cold ambition and corporate malice inside a large Manhattan-based manufacturing company. Patterns is a little over 60 years old, having opened on 3.12.56. It was originally broadcast live on Kraft Television Theatre on 1.12.55, and was so rapturously received that it was re-performed a few weeks later. Richard Kiley played the Heflin role on the Kraft show [see below]. Some critics believed that Patterns was the best thing that Serling ever wrote. The only problem viewer-wise was the title — average folks no doubt wondered it meant. Earnest apologies for not seeing it earlier. A high-def version is streamable on Amazon Prime.