Brudnoy's Film Index
Brudnoy, David
"Brudnoy's Film Index" A hymn of praise to the art of plastic surgery, face- and breastlift variety. Elizabeth Taylor is old, old old old and her husband, Henry Fonda, is hot for young stuff, so...
...Our joyless friends can do without perfume, but can they do without the hot dog...
...9 Cinderella Liberty: James Caan as a sailor with heart of gold, ready to undertake the regeneration trip with a chippie an officer refers to as a champagne-cocktail-sipping-teasing, dance-hall tart, or somesuch...
...Hot dogs...
...9 The New Land: Conclusion to Jan Troel's two-part epic, following 1972's The Emigrants...
...Let's be careful before we restrict the freedom of advertising speech to a recitation of objective product facts...
...And yet there is no relationship between objective product facts and the cut of a Dior dress or the color of a Revlon lipstick...
...The prof gets all the best lines...
...You might just kill one of America's genuine cultural contributions with enough product inf0rma~ion about the homely hot dog...
...5. Sometimes when I look into the flinty eyes of the reformers, I wonder if they would not be more comfortable in a world without perfume...
...If you take a walk in Warsaw--ar at Bob Jones University in South Carolina for that matter--you can get a look at men and women who live in a world without fashion and without cosmetics...
...It happens that the presentation of a lot of factual information is a very powerful selling vehicle indeed...
...And usually for the same reason...
...9 The Sting: Newman and Redford together again as lovable con men outwitting the baddies, looking smashing in 1930s duds...
...Humorless, endless, but with moments of Dustin Hoffman as Louis, who saves the film hither and yon from Steve McQueen as Papillon (Charri~re...
...One for the zanies only...
...Another stunning performance by yon Sydow, liberated from Ingraar Bergman at last...
...New product introduction is a channel sown with more shoals than Ulysses ever imagined...
...When Vance Packard said that there was something called subliminal advertising, the reformers believed every unsubstantiated word of it...
...The mortality rate for new products is more than 50 percent, as reported by A.C...
...Neither has Woody, thanks be...
...Fashion...
...But along comes Helmut Berger, a Younger Man, and by the time hubby arrives and lets on that new face or old, Liz is out, and the audience has concluded that there must be an easier way...
...Too much of the joy of the world would fly out of the window that dreary day...
...And yet what does it profit a man to know how many pig snouts are resting in the bosom of his beloved frank...
...this one is full of it...
...This is true, true and true again in the world of marketing...
...The Rolls-Royce advertisements of his time, and to this very day, provide the consumer with a veritable torrent of facts about that noble car...
...They like to drink...
...Not to mention Edsel, or the entire effort to keep American families in great big cars when they didn't want to be...
...9 Executive Action: As everyone knows, the rightwing killed JFK...
...they haven't changed a bit...
...Nielsen...
...We ran eight full pages in an insert on offshore drilling and every page was read better than any other advertisement in the magazine...
...9 Papillon: Oh, 13 million bucks, give or take a million, to chart French safecracker Henri Charri~re's many escapes from imprisonment in French Guyana...
...9 The Exorcist: William Peter Blatty's compelling novel screened magnificently...
...popular with rednecks North and South...
...After all, at this moment,: you are listening to the man who wrote the advertising for Rinso Soap, which, backed by five million dollars, did absolutely nothing to convince American women that soap was better than detergents...
...I grew up at Ogilvy, Benson, and Mather where David Ogilvy presented more facts more artfully than anyone before or since...
...Diane Keaton is on hand to help Woody escape from the cops, circa 2173...
...This one is so superior to most scare-em-uppers that the genre must henceforth revise its canons and take off from this...
...Then Campbell, which makes few mistakes, did the same with Red Kettle Soupmixes with spectacular lack of success...
...The dogs don't like it...
...You didn't know...
...But there are product categories and advertising problems that are not best solved by reams of product information...
...little to do with what a woman wants to know about perfume and might even prove counterproductive to her understanding of Chanel No...
...And the power of advertising has never been so dented as by The Alternative March 1974 27...
...Cosmetics...
...Never underestimate the power of dreck in Hollywood hands...
...And they love Holiday Inns, no matter how ugly they may be...
...If it were true, why isn't there one recorded example of a marketer using it...
...The dogs have to like it or no amount of advertising will make them d o s o . Now sometimes the dogs like something that the consumer advocates and other social Critics don't want them to like...
...9 Ash Wednesday: A hymn of praise to the art of plastic surgery, face- and breastlift variety...
...DuPont developed Corfam as a replacement for shoe leather and spent tens of millions of dollars in an utterly unsuc, cessful attempt to persuade people that Corfam was good for them...
...The one-liners are side-splitting, quite so, and the sight-gags are Ke.atonesque...
...And often that's right...
...a violent picture that workS, more's the pity...
...Harvard will survive this trifle...
...Next up: how the Klan framed Sirhan so that the Minutemen could kill Bobby Kennedy...
...Time after time, the manufactttrer goes to market with what seems a swell idea and invariably backed by large sums for advertising...
...The dogs like Big Macs...
...A must-see, but read the book first for a double treat...
...Incomparably the finest treatment of the great European folk migration to the U.S...
...and if the film is less than first-rate, at least the costumes, cars, and props recall an era well...
...The third myth that afflicts our reformers is that advertising is all-powerflll...
...The more you tell, the more you sell, Ogilvy preached to me...
...Our agency does the corporate advertising for Exxon, and we have found because the public told us so--that the very best way to gain understanding for the oil business and its various complex problems is to tell all---every fact that is germane about offshore drilling, supertankers, the energy crisis, and so forth...
...First, Knorr spent million after million on this worthy project...
...Ellen Burstyn as the mother, Max von Sydow and Jason Miller as the exorcising priests, Linda Blair as daughter Regan and the devil himself...
...What...
...VVv . . . . . 7 - - pected and the consumer allows for this natural bias...
...Much perfume is made, as you know, with a base of ambergris which is the morbid excretion in the alimentary canal of the sperm whale...
...Let me try to explain what I mean...
...The consumerists, tn their earnest way, are far more true believers in adver tising.than its practitioners...
...after which, Hollywood's version of the great Birch conspiracy to murder Martin Luther King...
...It seems a drab and dreary world indeed by comparison to the outside universe...
...The soup companies have been particularly active in trying to get women to buy dried soups...
...Because they have been mercifully removed from the realities of the marketplace, and we cannot escape knowledge so easily...
...They must be victims of olfactory fatigue never to have stood in a room when a woman walked in wafting the perfumes of Araby and rendering normal males happily senseless, even if the perfume did rest on a base of the morbid excretion in the al'imentary canal of the sperm whale...
...As the old saw goes, you can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think...
...9 Last Tango in Paris: Threatens to endure as long as Nixon...
...I submit that this piece of product information has...
...9 "Walking Tall: Reissued and going strong, this tale of a Southern sheriff cleaning out the evil ones feeds on the American bloodlust...
...Elizabeth Taylor is old, old old old and her husband, Henry Fonda, is hot for young stuff, so Liz goes to a Swiss beauty farm and has the complete job...
...in the nineteenth century...
...Perfume...
...A puff for prison reform, at the very least, and guess which man named D*LT*N TR*MB* is involved again . . . . _9 Sleeper: Woody Allen's back, superlatively wacky, in a tale of 200 years hence...
...9 Jonathan Livingston Seagull: Watch out for the droppings...
...Let Dalton Trumbe, Donald Freed, and Mark Lane show you, courtesy of Burt Lancaster, Will Geer, Robert Ryan (as the heavies), old news footage, constructed news footage, and Loe Harvey Who...
...9 The Paper Chase: SO that's what it's like at Harvard Law...
...Her only baggage is a twelveyear-old mulatto son, illegitimate, and a kid, ditto, on the way, but sailors' dreams never die, e r g o . . . _9 Day for Night: Truffaut's song to the cinema, an intricate, yet easy ramble through the ironies of movie-making within the well-made flick...
...A French connection worth making...
...as the patsy...
Vol. 7 • March 1974 • No. 6
