User Reviews

A man with a chef's outfit and W. C. Field's delivery demonstrates some kitchen tools to turn potatoes into fancy dishes and announces that these sets will be given away free in the theater.

It's the sort of spiel that you used to see on street corners and in more elaborate forms today on shopping networks. My cousin, now a distinguished doctor, had a summer job selling junk like this in Coney Island forty years ago -- with him it was some sort of dirty postcards.

It's more a curiosity today than a particularly interesting movie and shows a selling technique that is probably as old as civilization. I don't doubt that four thousand years ago some traveling salesman pulled into small villages in Mesopotamia to sell the locals some cheap stuff from big city.

A chef demonstrates various kitchen tools for a theatrical short. The man is narrating with a W. C. Fields voice. Most of it frames the screen around his hands working the tools. The offer is to receive one piece out of the 12 piece set once a week every time the audience attends the theater. Some reviewers have pointed out that this is much more likely to have been shown in the 30's. The Campbell's Pork and Beans can does look like the 1920's design. This makes more sense as a Depression era giveaway. I'm more interested in where this was shown. To me, the biggest flaw, aside from the amateur production, is a failure to advertise the brand. It's a fascinating bit of cinematic oddity that is now being shown on TCM. It may have lured some of the targeted housewives which was the point but I wonder how successful was it.

This cheap--VERY cheap--five-minute short has a chef demonstrating how to use such kitchen utensils as can openers, peeling knives and french- fry cutters, among other things. It's not much to look at--the camera is locked on the chef's hands using the various tools for almost the entire length of the film--but there are several things that make me believe this film was not made in 1950, as stated in the IMDb listing. The chef says his lines in a kind of sing-song cadence that carnival barkers, medicine-show spielers and W.C. Fields used to use. The sound is extremely primitive, with a lot of pops and hisses, such as you'd hear in talkies from the early 1930s. The photography is very grainy, and not at all what you would see in a film--no matter how low the budget--made in 1950. Also, the opening credits are in the kind of art-deco style used in many low-budget films from the early 1930s, especially by Warner Brothers. All of this makes me believe that the film was made around 1933 or 1934, but I'd feel safe in betting money that there is no way this short was made anywhere near 1950.

The year on this video is incorrect. It is from 1930 or 1931 The can of Campbell's Pork and Beans came out in 1920s. the can from the 1950s had a picture of beans on it. But the film itself is really cool and fun to watch. I didn't realize that Kitchen Utensil demonstrations went back to the 1920s and 30s.