"The Hucksters" on TCM Today

[Hidden Stillness]

"The Hucksters," on TCM this today, is a great and very underrated movie, with a very perceptive script and a great cast. It was one of the earliest of a group of movies and plays from the late '40s and all of the '50s, that explored, and exposed, the corporate world and the world of commercial advertising, pressures, corruption, etc., with very sharp dialogue and smart characters, (like "The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit," "Patterns," "Executive Suite," etc.), and great books like "What Makes Sammy Run?"

It is about a returning WWII vet, (Gable), who takes a job at an advertising agency, and gets assigned to help with an account for a soap. There are many very well-written scenes showing just how completely phony these people are, always, always, working an angle, pitching, one-upping and hiding their true selves from each other, many great scenes showing the panic, worry, real fear, and total submissiveness of the staff, before the advertiser, and you get the sense of how pervasive that is, as a way of life, and business. Gable meets a young woman from England who will be part of an ad campaign, a war widow with two small children, (Deborah Kerr in her first American role, and great already), who is offended at the vulgar nightgown she is supposed to wear, for no reason, for the ad. This is another very clearly-drawn observation by the writer--screenwriter Luther Davis, from a novel by Frederic Wakeman--how vulgar, offensive, mannerless, obnoxious, the top males at the agency are.

Gable starts to fall in love with the Kerr character, and after first trying to pull a cheap stunt on her, tricking her into a motel room that is actually adjoining, so that she leaves, begins to regain a totally lost sense of moral bearing, and respect for people, honest treatment of them, and a wish for a real life of happiness. The scenes build, with a cheesy comedian being promoted for a radio show, trying to trick the booking agency into selling the comedian for less, with more great dialogue on the train, Gable saying, (I think this was a direct quote), "What is America to us? A blank space between New York and Los Angeles, where people buy soap." Later, talking to the Ava Gardner character, a singer, who explains that people nowadays like a quieter type of singer, not like what the agency is promoting, Gable answers, "Unfortunately, it's not what the people want that counts in radio. It's what the advertiser wants that counts." There are great, and very funny scenes showing how horrible and embarrassing the writing of the radio commercials is, especially one great secne where Ava Gardner's character can't even manage to keep the radio on one station, because it keeps getting interrupted and ruined by one annoying, stupid, insulting commercial after another, and she finally just turns the radio off. You would never get a scene like that nowadays past the corporate censor.

Gable's behavior starts to get worse, more manipulative and abusive, just to get an angle and win an account, and now with the influence of Deborah Kerr, Gable actually cares. Finally at the end, Gable is fed up with the--now actually called by name--"sadistic," "tyrant" behavior of the Sidney Greenstreet character, the advertiser, stands up to Greenstreet for all those too intimidated to do it, and quits. Gable and Kerr now plan to be married and start off life as two honest people.

The thing you get from these very early analyses of commercial advertising and all the rest, is a real, careful study of the situation, and the problems and threats. The anti-corporate story was still carefully explained, like a literary thing, so that you now understood something, and could stand against it; not like now, where the anti-advertising patter is just as fake and slogan-y as the corporate crap itself. This was a very smart, great, moral movie.

http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title.jsp?stid=2236