Politics and show biz. Style over substance. Demagoguery and Nielsen Ratings. Fifty years of U.S. History - the Depression, the Cold War, the Bomb, Civil Rights, Vietnam, the Peace Movement, Law and Order, Women's Lib. All the causes and the men and women who led them ... The movers and shakers, the white knights and the charlatans...
All of these and more parade by with polemical colors flying in the 70-minute retrospective, Promise Them Anything, the first public theatrical exhibition of an original and timely collection of political and campaign television commercials and short films.
Promise Them Anything begins in pre-TV 1933, then skips ahead to 1944 with two pro-New Deal and pro-Roosevelt cartoons (light, reverential toward the sponsor, sarcastic toward his opponent, and produced with all the flash and bravura of the latest cinematic techniques) that set the tone and established the tradition for future portrayals of political figures on film.
The commercials represented in Promise Them Anything have been chosen for their historical significance, but also for their sophistication of production and, naturally, for their entertainment value. They're often so well-done, in fact, that we tend to forget as we watch them that a segment of the electorate is swayed almost solely by these messages - sixty- and thirty-second films that condense vital issues and concerns into brief, superficial slogans of gut-level impact.
James Hall produced Filmex '79's three-and-one-half-hour homage to the USC Division of Cinema on the event of its fiftieth anniversary last year, and in 1978 created And Now an Animated Word From Our Sponsor..., the first-ever retrospective of the neglected art of animated TV commercials. He has served on the Filmex selection committees since 1976. For Promise Them Anything, Hall has again searched the vaults and archives of the land for more fascinating and rare film material. Very few of the TV ads seen in his current show have been viewed since their original broadcast dates.