MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 @ 10:00 AM (ET)
Merriam-Webster defines “huckster” as “one who sells or advertises something in an aggressive, dishonest, or annoying way.” They also offer a secondary meaning: “one who produces promotional material for commercial clients especially for radio or television.” The secondary meaning certainly carries with it the suggestion of the first.
In the film The Hucksters, Clark Gable is Vic Norman-home from the war and eager to get back into civilian life, and his former career in advertising. In a somewhat audacious attempt to impress ad agency boss “Kim” Kimberly (Adolphe Menjou), Vic offers to recruit a “society lady” to endorse “Beautee Soap.” The matron, Mrs. Dorrance, turns out to be Deborah Kerr, in her first American film
appearance. She’s an easy sell, and vic signs her up. He produces a photo shoot with Mrs. Dorrance in a gown rather than the flimsy negligee chosen by The Sponsor, one Evan Llewellyn Evans (Sydney Greenstreet). This leads to the first of several show-downs between the two. Vic wins this one.
But he’s now tasked with going to Hollywood and producing a radio show which must star Buddy Hare (Keenan Wynn), an uncouth blowhard baggy pants comic favored by Evans. After much brainstorming, Vic and the writers finally devise a
character for Hare: a huckster. When a contractual problem arises with Hare, Vic stoops to blackmailing Hare’s agent, Dave Lash (Edward Arnold) in order to keep Hare under contract. He immediately recoils in disgust at the realization of what he’s done. He returns to New York with a
successful show pilot in the can and his self-respect in the garbage can, setting up his final conflict with Evans.
The performances of the second-line cast is one of the strengths of The Hucksters. Sydney Greenstreet’s Evans is a towering presence and a worthy opponent for Gable in their battle of wills. Adolphe Menjou is unctuously craven in the face of Evans, but also has a very affecting emotional scene of drunken self-recrimination. With all the heels he’s played in his career, I can’t recall a similar introspection. It’s the first film for Ava Gardner following her eye-opening performance
as Kitty in The Killers (1946) and she shines. Would have liked to have seen more of her. Keenan Wynn’s overbearing presence, his corny jokes and his klaxon of a voice combine to make him the ideal Buddy Hare. And The Hucksters provides a rare opportunity to see Edward Arnold in a good guy role after his performances as Capra’s favorite heavy in You Can’t Take It With You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Meet John Doe
Although it’s set within the advertising world, this film is only nominally about the ad industry: it’s about the all-too-familiar challenge we all confront: how much of our self-respect or our morals are we willing to sacrifice for a desired outcome? From the Yale Drama School graduate who accepts a role on a moronic sit-com to a legislator who votes for a destructive bill to satisfy a wealthy donor, compromise comes with a price. The criticism of actual advertising practices is actually fairly limited. It’s less a critique of the industry in general than of Evans and his way of doing business. At one point, Vic fires off a memo to Kimberly disparaging the hard sell techniques they’re using to sell Beautee Soap-the stupidity, the simplicity, the repetitiveness-and urges more respect for the audience’s intelligence. And after his final renunciation of Evans, he doesn’t quit to write an exposé like Walter Matthau’s character in A Face in the Crowd, or even to write a novel. He simply vows to find a way to sell with dignity.
To really understand this film, you need to be familiar with the history of how the television and radio industries have financed themselves. Some younger viewers may not be aware that the practice of sponsors buying commercial time, usually in 30 second or one minute slots, has not always been the case. From the emergence of commercial network radio in the mid 1920s and continuing through the transition to television and into the late 1950s, the networks were essentially common carriers, selling blocks of time to a sponsor who provided the programming content. The sponsor would in turn hire an advertising agency to produce the programs to attract the audiences and to produce the commercials to get the audience to pay for them. And sometimes it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began.
