Daily Blague

Thanks to a touch of food poisoning that kept me up for a while last night, I'm under the weather today, and I won't get to the already-late Book Review review until tomorrow. But here is something entertaining from today's Times: an article by Stuart Elliott about the fake products that were featured in movies of the studio period.

Before product placement became a lucrative business, movie studios mostly kept well-known brands off the screen. They generally considered the appearance of real products to be too great a distraction from the escapist worlds they conjured up for moviegoers at neighborhood cinemas.

This intrigues me, because I always found the fake products distracting. Being a noticing sort of person (as Miss Marple puts it), I identified the labels on cans and cereal boxes as fake simply because I didn't recognize them. Fictional brand-names and obviously phony dollar bills infected the world of screen entertainment with an ersatz atmosphere that was anything but alluring. Today's escapism, soundly rooted in product-placement, is much more convincing.

I didn't see Easy Living (1937) - directed by Mitchell Leisen but written by Preston Sturges - until I was all grown up, and could quickly spot the "Hotel Louis," pronounced à la française but sounding very à la Bronxaise, as a take on the very plush Pierre. Mr Elliott doesn't mention this one, but he does spot two other well-known Sturges inventions, Maxford House Coffee (Christmas in July, 1940) and Pike's Pale Ale (that won for Yale - The Lady Eve, 1941).