The Power and the Prize

Middle-aged Cliff Barton is the Vice-Chair of Amalgamated World Metals, a New York-based company specializing in natural resources. George Salt, Amalgamated's aging, long-serving, cutthroat Chair, sees Cliff as the heir apparent to the company, who George has molded in his own corporate image. George believes that the wives of business executives are just as important as the executives themselves in the wives needing to support their husbands openly in the operation of their respective company. George also believes that Cliff's fiancee, George's own young niece Joan Salt, will be such a wife, demonstrating her loyalty, despite her obvious disappointment, in supporting Cliff in the need to take an extended business trip to London, with him being gone on what was supposed to be the day of their wedding. That trip is to ink a lucrative deal that would set he and Joan up in their new life together. Mrs. Salt asks Cliff to do her a favor while in England by looking into a London-based charity she supports, one that assists Central European refugee artists in eking out a new artistic life in England. The charity is operated by widowed Miriam Linka, one such Austrian refugee herself and whose husband was killed in the war. Despite her initial open disdain for Americans like Cliff - wealthy, privileged and cocksure - and their antagonistic beginning, the two end up falling in love. He wants to marry her but she makes him question his core beliefs in the way he has behaved at Amalgamated with who was to be his father-in-law. The question then becomes if there is any way to reconcile Cliff's desire to marry Miriam against his life at Amalgamated with George at the helm, with George's feelings about Joan and Miriam - without even having met the latter - at the core, especially with the innuendo swirling around Miriam. Cliff's livelihood in its entirety, at least in the corporate world, hangs in the balance.