Hello!

We welcome new guest reviewer Denise Morrison to CineSavant today … and look forward to more coverage of silent movies … and whatever else appeals to her… !

First up as an item sent over by Gary Teetzel, who found something amusing in an old movie Press Book.

The United Artists / Stanley Kramer sales job for the producer’s sobering atomic Sci-fi drama  On the Beach  was a bigger milestone and must have cost a pretty penny. With the serious notion of ‘changing the world’, the campaign held multiple premieres in numerous world capitals, spreading the film’s stars across the globe for extra publicity. This was touted in the film’s trailer, which also had film footage of the giant billboard in New York, with the slogan written to the right.  →  Ad taglines tended toward hyperbole — this one certainly claimed to have an inside track on the film’s grim subject matter.

The pressbook has plenty of examples of standard ballyhoo ideas, plus tie-ins with record albums, the pocketbook edition. It’s all pretty classy … with a few exceptions.

←  This one’s not bad … a plug in a taxicab to start up a conversation with the drive. It sounds like a good idea in theory, but what kind of inducement does the taxi driver get?  Are the drivers invited to a special screening?  If they were given tickets for their families, I’d think half would accept, and then tell their fares that a buncha Hollywood crooks wanted them to shill for their pinko soap opera. We need footage of Travis Bickle pontificating on the pros and cons of missile defense systems.

→  Now, when I ponder the problem of radioactive fallout, I always light up my best pipe and look for the right tobacco to put in it. I’m sure you do too, but in reverse order. Once upon a time, it wa s standard for stars to endorse products they might never go near; old magazines were full of plugs for booze and cigarettes and everything else, from a galaxy of stars. Did the mention of the upcoming movie mean that United Artists helped pay for the ad, or that they provided Gregory Peck?  I wonder how much money changed hands, and who it went to.

In the defense of this ad, Mr. Peck does seem the kind of guy who smokes a pipe.

←  Things start to go Psychotronic with this tie-in ad for a Hasbro toy. Did anybody in the 1950s say that we’d become a warline nation?  My only way to answer that is my clear memory of a cereal box (sometime between 1958 and 1961) that somehow let kids choose what kind of machine gun toy they wanted … the back panel had at least 9 different models.

This ad for an ‘Atomic Submarine Torpedo Toy” seems to want to generete ‘On the Beach’ fever in little kids. It suggests a giveaway “to promote small number of subs for special matinee prizes for youngsters.” Whoa, I never met a kid who saw On the Beach when it was new … my parents treated my curiosity about it, as if it were pornography, or at least something I shouldn’t be worrying my pointed little head about. I guess that’s better than a lobby display of a fallout shelter, or a nurse with a geiger counter, to see which of our classmates has picked a lethal dose from the family reactor. Yep, On the Beach is about peace and harmony, except for the part about the Atomic Submarine Torpedo Toy.

→  The winning entry is the one that Gary pointed out in the first place. Fred Astaire did indeed co-found a nationwide chain of dance studios, and they in fact are still going strong as franchises. He was directly involved on some level until 1966, which means that this tie-in plug may have been something he knew about.

According to this blurb in the Press Book, The Free Dance lesson idea can be taken up in several ways. The connection is the waltz ‘Waltzing Matilda’ — which to musically-challenged me is more like a ballad. Can one force it into a form that one could use it to teach the waltz?

To me the Waltzing Matilda tune is one of On the Beach’s weakest ideas. A couple of cues with the melody would be fine, but it’s grossly over-used and becomes a pain when re-watching the movie. Leaning to dance with it sounds like torture.

Anyway, Gary’s email helps lighten the mood at CineSavant Central — we’re presently reviewing the atomic-misery epic Threads.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson