Helping You Sell (1937)

★★★★★ · Jam it up your mass! · Steve Nordby · 2004-02-29

Mass production. Mass market. Mass selling. You know they want it. Satisfy them! Performance! Close the deal! Get them young - in the schools! Just like the Nazis! Reaching thousands! Entire families! I had not considered this before, but Jam Handy ranks with Leni Riefenstahl in propaganda film making. And a nice shot of the uncompleted SF-Oakland Bay Bridge.

★★★★ · The Master Key · Wilford B. Wolf · 2003-05-17

"Helping You Sell" is an bit of an oddball film, since it is a Jam Handy film basically about Jam Handy films. But what is so very important about this particular film is it explains how many of those classic Jam Handy films, like "Case Of Spring Fever", or "Coach For Cinderella", or "Master Hands" were used in selling Chevorlet cars. The film was obviously created for a regional sales meeting, and it explains Chevorlet's strategy of using short films and pseudo-newsreels to help sell cars. This method, the film explains, is help drive a mass marketing campaign and let the salesmen focus on…

★★★ · Selling Cars For You, Mr. Dealer, Thanks to Jam Handy · Dodsworth the Cat · 2024-09-06

This advertising film is about advertising films. In usual Jam Handy fashion, it takes a while to get there. It opens with a farm which is merely a rather forced analogy to mass selling. Then we get salesmen ringing doorbells, as if that's how cars are sold. Then we get money-saving used footage of Jam Handy films plugging Chevrolets. This short has the familiar Jam Handy announcer in a studio where the reverb isn't deadened by curtains, and those odd wipes the studio loved, including one that segues from scene to scene using a Chevrolet logo. And there's the spinning wheel of advertising and…

★★★ · Car Film Porn · Spuzz · 2003-07-21

This film, which details WHY Jem Handy and Chevrolet makes films about every freaking part of a car and where to show it, is split in half. The first is a somewhat strange overview of how the salesman can effectively get their message across (which leads me to believe that they had door to door salepeople for cars back then) and then explains that the BEST way to get these messages across is showing these films to the masses! In movie theaters! To Civic groups! To School Children (so they can pressure their parents into getting a motor vehicle (which is REALLY stretching it). After that, we…

★★★ · Sell Cars, Sell Jam Handy · JayKay49 · 2015-10-27

A film that highlights mass sales techniques 1937 style. Yes, kids did badger parents about what kind of car to buy but the adults paid little attention - at least that was the case 20 yrs later. Salesmen today do not do the pricing. The sales manager does. Notice at the dealership how they all have to go to the back before the price is finalized? Saw that scene on the assembly line with the minz astride a rack that moves back and forth on their film about the Flint MI GM plant. For some reason, fascinating to me. Wonder if anybody ever got accidently welded to a frame. This film amounts to…