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...
...9 Jonathan Livingston Seagull: Watch out for the droppings...
...a violent picture that workS, more's the pity...
...Ellen Burstyn as the mother, Max von Sydow and Jason Miller as the exorcising priests, Linda Blair as daughter Regan and the devil himself...
...Not to mention Edsel, or the entire effort to keep American families in great big cars when they didn't want to be...
...Too much of the joy of the world would fly out of the window that dreary day...
...Humorless, endless, but with moments of Dustin Hoffman as Louis, who saves the film hither and yon from Steve McQueen as Papillon (Charri~re...
...The consumerists, tn their earnest way, are far more true believers in adver tising.than its practitioners...
...Nielsen...
...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...
...Hot dogs...
...9 The Exorcist: William Peter Blatty's compelling novel screened magnificently...
...As the old saw goes, you can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think...
...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...
...When Vance Packard said that there was something called subliminal advertising, the reformers believed every unsubstantiated word of it...
...What...
...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...
...Incomparably the finest treatment of the great European folk migration to the U.S...
...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...
...I grew up at Ogilvy, Benson, and Mather where David Ogilvy presented more facts more artfully than anyone before or since...
...A must-see, but read the book first for a double treat...
...And often that's right...
...And yet there is no relationship between objective product facts and the cut of a Dior dress or the color of a Revlon lipstick...
...New product introduction is a channel sown with more shoals than Ulysses ever imagined...
...Another stunning performance by yon Sydow, liberated from Ingraar Bergman at last...
...The dogs don't like it...
...Then Campbell, which makes few mistakes, did the same with Red Kettle Soupmixes with spectacular lack of success...
...The prof gets all the best lines...
...9 The Sting: Newman and Redford together again as lovable con men outwitting the baddies, looking smashing in 1930s duds...
...Our joyless friends can do without perfume, but can they do without the hot dog...
...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 Ash Wednesday: A hymn of praise to the art of plastic surgery, face- and breastlift variety...
...Next up: how the Klan framed Sirhan so that the Minutemen could kill Bobby Kennedy...
...They like to drink...
...And the power of advertising has never been so dented as by The Alternative March 1974 27...
...One for the zanies only...
...It seems a drab and dreary world indeed by comparison to the outside universe...
...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...
...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...
...First, Knorr spent million after million on this worthy project...
...in the nineteenth century...
...Harvard will survive this trifle...
...We ran eight full pages in an insert on offshore drilling and every page was read better than any other advertisement in the magazine...
...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...
...And they love Holiday Inns, no matter how ugly they may be...
...Because they have been mercifully removed from the realities of the marketplace, and we cannot escape knowledge so easily...
...It happens that the presentation of a lot of factual information is a very powerful selling vehicle indeed...
...The third myth that afflicts our reformers is that advertising is all-powerflll...
...9 The New Land: Conclusion to Jan Troel's two-part epic, following 1972's The Emigrants...
...The mortality rate for new products is more than 50 percent, as reported by A.C...
...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...
...Diane Keaton is on hand to help Woody escape from the cops, circa 2173...
...after which, Hollywood's version of the great Birch conspiracy to murder Martin Luther King...
...And yet what does it profit a man to know how many pig snouts are resting in the bosom of his beloved frank...
...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 patsy...
...The dogs like Big Macs...
...The one-liners are side-splitting, quite so, and the sight-gags are Ke.atonesque...
...You didn't know...
...This is true, true and true again in the world of marketing...
...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...
...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...
...9 The Paper Chase: SO that's what it's like at Harvard Law...
...But there are product categories and advertising problems that are not best solved by reams of product information...
...popular with rednecks North and South...
...I submit that this piece of product information has...
...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...
...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...
...this one is full of it...
...You might just kill one of America's genuine cultural contributions with enough product inf0rma~ion about the homely 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...
...If it were true, why isn't there one recorded example of a marketer using it...
...9 Executive Action: As everyone knows, the rightwing killed JFK...
...Perfume...
...9 Last Tango in Paris: Threatens to endure as long as Nixon...
...9 "Walking Tall: Reissued and going strong, this tale of a Southern sheriff cleaning out the evil ones feeds on the American bloodlust...
...And usually for the same reason...
...Cosmetics...
...Let's be careful before we restrict the freedom of advertising speech to a recitation of objective product facts...
...Time after time, the manufactttrer goes to market with what seems a swell idea and invariably backed by large sums for advertising...
...and if the film is less than first-rate, at least the costumes, cars, and props recall an era well...
...Never underestimate the power of dreck in Hollywood hands...
...The soup companies have been particularly active in trying to get women to buy dried soups...
...This one is so superior to most scare-em-uppers that the genre must henceforth revise its canons and take off from this...
...A French connection worth making...
...Let me try to explain what I mean...
...they haven't changed a bit...
...little to do with what a woman wants to know about perfume and might even prove counterproductive to her understanding of Chanel No...
...Fashion...
...VVv . . . . . 7 - - pected and the consumer allows for this natural bias...
...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...
...Neither has Woody, thanks be...
Vol. 7 • March 1974 • No. 6
