‘Movie Ads’ (review)

Written by Simon Melzer
Published by BearManor Media

In 1973, the movie Soylent Green had a clever marketing campaign with different ads appearing daily in our local newspaper.

At age 14, I began clipping them out. This led to my clipping out more ads for movies that looked interesting…or at least had interesting ads. At first, I just kept them in a box under the couch (for easy access since I usually saw the newspaper in the living room after everyone else was done with it).

Eventually, I decided to pick up a scrapbook at Woolworth and started taping them in every night (don’t judge me!). Soon I had filled that scrapbook and started another, then another.

Between 1973 and 1985, I filled 28 scrapbooks with movie ads!

But they were too unwieldy to handle and when we went to move, I salvaged ads and pages I wanted to keep but trashed the rest. (Again, no judging me!)

You’ve no doubt seen some of my ads on various websites. Years ago, I scanned quite a few and posted many on my blogs. Then others took them and reposted them elsewhere. You can usually recognize mine by the tape residue!

Anyway, it follows that I am a massive fan of movie marketing. I’ve collected a ton of new, virtual ads for older movies via the various online magazine and newspaper archives. I even tried a dedicated movie ad blog at one point. Sadly, it was my least successful blogging endeavor.

Simon Melzer had similar experiences to me but unlike scrapbooks, he’s put a bunch of his cool ads for older movies into a book from BearManor Media. Coming in at well over 500 pages, the basically titled Movie Ads presents a collection of wonderful trade mag ads for mainstream motion pictures released from the 1930s through the 1960s.

With only a brief introduction and a few even briefer words at the beginning of each chapter, Melzer prefers to let the ads speak for themselves, as they were meant to do. The only annotations on any of the individual pages are the years of original publication.

One’s enjoyment of such a book, of course, depends entirely on how much of a film buff one happens to be. Even then, budding film buffs today seem to lack that gene that had all of us back in my day scrambling to find out everything they could about who and what had come before. In the 1970s, Paul Newman, Julie Andrews, and Woody Allen were all well and good but we would go out of our way to catch movies starring Humphrey Bogart, Charlie Chaplin, James Dean, or the Marx Brothers. Even the Ritz Brothers!

Movie Ads has offers plenty of classics that many will at least have heard of such as My Man Godfrey, The Dawn Patrol, Anchors Aweigh, It’s a Wonderful Life, Rebel Without a Cause, and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.

For the true aficionado, however, the lesser-known productions are even more interesting. After all, remember, when these ads were designed, every single one of these movies had hoped to hit it big, but now most are forgotten. The forgotten ones here, though, have just as many once-big stars, from Clark Gable and Lauren Bacall to Audie Murphy and Frank Sinatra.

For the most part, all the ads are presented nicely in their original format. Many are black and white, some grey, a relative handful in full color, and quite a few with just a single color highlighting otherwise black and white images. A few are cropped a bit off and others are a tad blurry but nothing really to complain about. Backmatter consists of a full index of all the movie titles therein.

Due to its subject matter, Simon Melzer’s Movie Ads is, despite its size, a quick “read,” but if this is your type of thing, a genuinely enjoyable one.

For me, it’s great to have all these in one place and indexed! You wouldn’t believe how often I’ve tried to re-find a movie ad I’ve seen before but can never remember where I saw it! I’ll be keeping this reverence handy.

If you’re an old film buff like me, you should, too. If you’re a young film buff and wonder what you’ve missed over the past 100 years, there’s a lot of stuff in this book to intrigue you!

Booksteve recommends.