“The chief business of the American people is business,” president Calvin Coolidge said in a 1925 speech. Given a few more years, he might have added that one of the chief businesses of American business is making promotional short films touting their successes. Ever since the dawn of cinema, companies large and small have used the power of motion pictures–and, today, TV and the Internet–to put their best faces forward while educating and occasionally entertaining the public. Now, six of these vintage efforts have been collected on a newly released DVD entitled Industrial Strength America.
As befits their ’40s and ’50s origins, the focus of the films in this strangely fascinating sampler is split between the use of the country’s natural resources–water, metals and, as one short states, “America’s ever-increasing supply of oil”–for energy, commerce and defense as well as the values of red-blooded, Red-bashing American ingenuity and free enterprise. It’s a mix and live-action and animated works, with one made under the auspices of the U.S. Department of the Interior (Naturally, this last one’s release history was mixed up with politics).
First on the roster is 1954’s Born in Freedom: The Story of Colonel Drake. Vincent Price, in between Hollywood turns in House of Wax and The Mad Magician, stars as oil drilling pioneer Edwin L. Drake (the “Colonel” was a fake title used to impress the locals). Amid jeers from skeptical townspeople who see little use for the black goo coming up from a nearby stream, Drake would labor for two years before setting up the first successful commercial oil well in northwestern Pennsylvania in 1859 and giving birth to the American petroleum industry. Among the familiar faces featured with Price in the short are Mack Sennett veteran Andy Clyde as a local blacksmith/well driller and everyone’s favorite Skipper, Alan Hale, Jr., as the head of the digging crew. It’s a well-done and straightforward biodrama (author Norman Reilly Raine created Tugboat Annie and co-wrote The Life of Emile Zola and The Adventures of Robin Hood, among others), although I couldn’t help waiting for the experimental oil drill to explode and turn Price into a gooey, scarred, vengeance-seeking madman.
Petroleum is also the theme of Fill ‘Er Up, a 1959 cartoon from the prolific studio of educational animated filmmaker John Sutherland. It seems somewhat ironic today that the cartoon opens in the Middle East, with a depiction of Aladdin and his labor-saving genie, before the action shifts to one of those bright and shiny mid-century service stations, the kind where uniformed attendants not only pumped your gas but also checked your oil and air pressure, cleaned your windshield, and (here, at least) wiped off drivers’ eyeglasses. From out of one of these oh-so-cheap station pumps appears a smiling “gas genie” who relates the story of how the precious liquid is south out, brought up from under the ground and refined, and how chemists and scientists from the selfless and public-minded oil companies work to improve fuel performance and efficiency and keep America’s brand-new superhighways humming.
The history of aluminum–from its days as a costly metal (more expensive than silver or gold) made into dinner dishes and utensils for the court of Napoleon III to its 20th-century uses in kitchenware, wiring, train and airplane parts, and more–is the subject of Unfinished Rainbows, a 1940 salute to the merger of the scientific method and capitalistic investment. Produced by (not surprisingly) the Aluminum Corporation of America, the film features Alan Ladd, two years shy of his star-making performance in This Gun for Hire, as young inventor Charles Martin Hall, who in the mid-1880s developed a process which used electrical current to cheaply extract aluminum from naturally-occurring compounds. Hall would go on to become one of ALCOA’s founding fathers and help launch several billion soft drink cans. My favorite line from Unfinished Rainbows: “Yes, they’re an adventurous lot, these men of aluminum!’
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erhaps the most intriguing, and controversial, short in this collection is The Columbia. Originally shot by the U.S. government and the Bonneville Power Administration in 1942, its finished production and release was delayed until 1949 due to World War II. In the 1950s, it’s said that Douglas McKay, President Eisenhower’s Interior secretary, wanted the film destroyed because of its emphasis on federally-funded projects over private industry. Along with powerful (no pun intended) footage of the construction of the massive Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state, The Columbia looks at efforts to build hydroelectric projects along the Columbia and Snake rivers in the Pacific Northwest. Featured are scenes from the mid-1930s Dust Bowl that brought drought-stricken settlers to the region and from the devastating 1948 Vanport, Oregon flood. It also boasts three songs by a 28-year-old Woody Guthrie (who actually wrote 26 tunes–over a four-week period!–for the filmmakers to select from). One of Guthrie’s works, “Roll on, Columbia,” would later be selected as Washington’s official folk song.
By the way, did you know that Noah used asphalt to coat the exterior and interior of his great ark, and that the substance was also a key component in the construction of the Tower of Babel (I didn’t recall any of that from Sunday School)? Well, then, were you aware that when he reached the island of Trinidad in the Caribbean, Christopher Columbus sealed his ships’ hulls with asphalt found there? That’s just part of the rich lore of “Nature wondrous material” that’s recounted in 1957’s Asphalt Through the Ages, which starts at the LaBrea Tar Pits and concludes–as one would expect a ’50s production of the Asphalt Institute to–with the country’s then-nascent interstate freeway system. From its history “binding together the arteries of civilization” to a call to the “romance under our rolling wheels,” the marvels of asphalt are laid out thicker than a crew filling in Philadelphia potholes in the springtime.
The final short, Destination Earth from 1956, is another John Sutherland animated effort, produced for the American Petroleum Institute. Co-written by Bill Scott, who helped create and supplied to voice of Bullwinkle J. Moose for Jay Ward, the cartoon is set on the planet Mars, where a dictator named Ogg rules over his subjects and controls all aspects of life, industry and commerce (Cold War audiences seeing this could appreciate why Mars was dubbed the “Red” Planet). In order to solve his society’s transportation problems, Ogg sends a Martian explorer, Colonel Cosmic, to Earth to see how the primitive Earthlings manage. Luckily for him, Col. Cosmic’s saucer lands in the good old U.S. of A., where an abundant supply of petroleum and competition between “thousands of oil companies” have combined to give Americans a higher standard of living “than in any other country on the whole planet.” After all, as Cosmic says, “In the U.S.A., anyone who is willing to risk it can drill for oil!” And just like “Colonel” Drake in Born in Freedom, his words spur an instantaneous hunt for oil across the Martian surface and a free enterprise revolution that kicks old Ogg to the curb
.Call them educational, call them propaganda, call them campy fun: the six shorts of Industrial Strength America harken back to a time when America was seen as secure in its energy future (and let’s not forget the coming “benefits” of atomic power) and when big business–the oil industry in particular–didn’t have quite the stigma that it carries today. You may not feel like sitting through the collection all at once, but watching a couple before a film–especially a film from the same era–makes for an entertaining bonus. And who knows? You may just learn a little something about aluminum or asphalt along the way.