Here, in 1977, the trailer seems finally to have achieved its modern grace. This uncomplicated, tasteful preview for Annie Hall culls a few funny bits from the movie and strings them together without any dopey narration, gaudy slogans, or clumsy transitions. It sounds simple, but it took Hollywood many decades to do it. Perhaps this trailer's air is a little too genteel, and perhaps the voice-over actor didn't need to state the title a second time at the end, but otherwise this isn't bad.
This one isn't much of a trailer at all. It's only a minute and forty-three seconds long, and twenty-three of those seconds consist of stock footage of airplanes. After that, we see one funny scene and one seemingly pointless scene (whom are Stan and Ollie recognizing?). Following these, snippets of a few seconds each close out the trailer.
I like it for the slogans -- especially "A roaring flight into the stratosphere of fun!" -- and the narrator's mock heroic tone. The advertisers' cognizance of moviegoers' desire to be cheered up during the Depression (The Flying Deuces was released in 1939) is almost unseemly in its obviousness: "Ol' man gloom is on the run" as a result of the movie's "joyous cast."
I would like to own the weird Laurel and Hardy doll heads that appear at the end.
Here's a post-Night of the Iguana trailer that still doesn't get it. Gone is the barking announcer and the over-the-top proclamations of excellence, but this preview for Cool Hand Luke (1967) is still too slow and too strange. Take, for instance, the opening scene, in which Paul Newman is caught cutting the heads off parking meters: No modern trailer would include so long a scene of Paul Newman cutting the heads off parking meters unless the movie were actually about Paul Newman cutting the heads off parking meters. Nearly the entire movie takes place inside the prison camp; how Luke got there is merely incidental.
It's also odd that the editors chose to cut Strother Martin's set up (" . . . for your own good") to Newman's "Wish you'd stop bein' so good to me" line, nullifying the latter's withering sarcasm. And although the "failure to communicate" line is nice and even became sort of iconic, need we hear it four times? As if that is not enough, it is actually written out for us at the end. The effect is bizarre. Perhaps that idea came from the same misguided editor who thought Newman's "Plastic Jesus" song would hold any of its poignancy when viewed out of context.
The sequence of Newman jumping fences is not bad, but the trailer does not even hint at the movie's affability or pathos. And the preview's choppy editing stands in contrast to the fluency that Stuart Rosenberg brings to the episodic drama. Moreover, where is George Kennedy?
This one is hilarious mostly because the advertisers expect us to believe that The Philadelphia Story must be a great movie because, when it was on Broadway, theatergoers paid the astronomical price of $4.40 per seat to see it! Wow, $4.40! For that much money, they could have bought a ride on the trolley, that swell new Benny Goodman record, and a two-story suburban home, I guess.
The trailer also seems to suggest, in the first two scenes, that The Philadelphia Story is essentially a comedy about wife-beating. It's not, but it's pretty funny anyway, although the trailer doesn't convey much of its charm. Jimmy Stewart certainly looks awfully young, though.
Here's another Huston/Bogart classic. This advertisement for Key Largo must be the quintessential overblown trailer of the '40s. Near the start, the radio voice feels compelled to state the title twice in succession, and then the swelling, triumphantly romantic music, which seems out of place in a preview for a noir-influenced picture and becomes downright creepy when Edward G. Robinson (!) emerges from a bathtub as it plays, begins. It is typical of the absurd language in which these advertisements are written when the announcer describes the island as "heat-ridden" instead of "hot."
But the real reason I've posted the trailers is the tagline: "Where adventure inflames men to violent action . . . and romance smoulders in women until it conquers or kills!" It doesn't get better than that.
Vanishing Point was released in 1971, and it's clear that, by that time, trailers had improved. This one is, at least, the right length, and it's pretty fast-paced, although perhaps that's only because they advertisers would have been hard-pressed to locate more than a couple slow scenes in Vanishing Point. The only major problem is that it seems the trailer is narrated by Tay Zonday, and the "Now he uses speed . . . to get himself up . . . to get himself . . . gone!" line is really corny, as if straight out of one of the videos they showed to us in health class in sixth grade. The rock music also stops too abruptly at 1:40.
Aside from that, however, it's not bad, and it's pretty impressive that they were able to get away with putting a naked chick in there.
I suspect that this may be the only trailer in the history of film that opens with a shot of a man who wrote the movie but did not direct or appear in it. I can think of only one screenwriter today who is viewed as a major selling point -- Charlie Kaufman (ugh) -- and even he does not receive anything like this kind of star treatment. Did audiences in 1961 care more about writers, or was this bad advertising? The Misfits flopped at the box office, for what it's worth.
The man we see first is, of course, Arthur Miller, and series of photographs of him flash before our eyes. The technique is repeated to introduce the movie's other big names: John Huston, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Clift. Title cards that identify the actors precede the photographs of them, but these are strangely absent before the photographs of Miller and Huston, the only two of this group who may have actually benefited from identification: Certainly Marilyn was far more recognizable than either of the men behind the scenes.
The trailer's music lends it a frantic quality that is somewhat arresting, but I don't know why it contains so little of the movie's excellent dialogue: Perhaps Miller's writing includes too few pithy one-liners of the kind that writers today seem to pen expressly for the previews. And although the advertisers make room for a shot of Monroe's butt and one of her in a bathing suit, the trailer contains no hint of the power of her performance, no suggestion that this role is more substantial than any of her previous parts. The advertisement concludes oddly as well, with a 38-second shot of Gable nuzzling up to a sleeping Monroe; by trailer standards, it's endless, and it features only one line of dialogue, which, though vaguely ominous, is hardly enough to justify the inclusion of the scene.
After watching the first 25 seconds of this trailer, I was sure the video had been mislabeled on YouTube. Opening with shots of airplanes, this clearly was not an advertisement for a Western.
But, if you're patient, you'll spot Monument Valley, and if you wait even longer, John Wayne, who, though second-billed, is really the movie's star, will appear at the 1:47 mark, after we've seen nearly every other character in the picture.
It was a wacky idea to try to lend Stagecoach some sort of relevance by comparing the vehicle itself to modern (by 1939 standards) forms of transportation, as if the picture were actually about the stagecoach -- a historical documentary, perhaps. Maybe the idea was to indicate that not so much had changed since the days of the Old West that viewers would be unable to connect on a personal level to the characters in Stagecoach. It doesn't really come across, but I think the advertisers must have been aiming for that: Stagecoach may have been the first semi-serious drama in the Western genre since the silent era (if you can call any silent picture "serious"), and I suppose advertisers must have been unsure what to do with a Western that was not a kiddie adventure story.
The result is an extremely ineffective trailer, filled with clumsy transitions from action to romance to pathos. It is, I think, generally a bad idea to reveal a movie's climax within a preview, but what's more remarkable is how that great, eternally memorable scene, in which John Wayne drops to the dirt and discharges his rifle, becomes so unexciting when viewed out of context.
"Never before has the screen combined such talent and artistry in one great motion picture!"
"From the thrilling pages of world-renowned author C.S. Forester's magnificent story and filmed in the jungles and headwaters of Africa, the dark continent, in all the magnificence of color by Technicolor comes the most exciting adventure ever screened!"
I think that pretty much says it all. When you use both "magnificent" and "magnificence" in a single sentence to describe two different aspects of a movie, you know you're dealing with a pretty magnificent movie or else some pretty bad advertisers. Funniest of all is the narrator's clarification that Africa is "the dark continent." Roughly as dated as that phrase is the idea that, if a movie is based on a well-liked novel, we must actually see a copy of the novel, just to be sure that it does indeed exist: Forester's book swoops onto the screen, with a man and a woman who look a lot like Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn on its cover. So you know the movie is well-cast. As I remember it, The African Queen is highly entertaining, but this preview makes me think I must have misjudged it.
Notice how the trailer cuts directly from Hepburn's heartbroken accusation of treachery right to an image of a grinning, laughing Bogart, set to music so chipper that it could only have been stolen from Looney Toons. Was this really edited by a human? The concluding iris wipe featuring Hepburn actually makes me feel bad for her.
