Trailer Camp

Ed Sullivan stars in this one.

 

More a featurette than a trailer, this short has Jack Benny promoting his film of Charley's Aunt (1941). Co-stars Tyrone Power and Randolph Scott as themselves.

 

This is all that's left of the silent Great Gatsby, which is a lost film. It gives us an idea of how audiences of the time experienced the story. Note how even the trailer uses the "eyes watching you" motif from the book.

 

I don't know if any other movie has ever been this hyped in the trailer. It seems to runs out of superlatives before the end: of the chariot race, it can only say the scene "defies description".

 

Another trailer for a lost film: The Patriot, directed by Ernst Lubitsch. This won a Best Screenplay Oscar; it's also the only missing Best Picture nominee.



Note how Lewis Stone is hyped as possessing "Polished Acting Genius" (followed by a close-up of him staring impassively), while Neil Hamilton is described as merely "handsome and popular".

 

The Thing is one of my favorites. So I decided to do a remaster of the original trailer.

 

Stan Freberg did this one:

 

Nice essay on this trailer:
Greenbriar Picture Shows: Columbia's Suggestive Selling for 1958 »

 

This one's notable fore the hilariously awful mugging of Robert Evans, apparently shot special for this trailer. And isn't that Bernard Herrmann's music for The Day The Earth Stood Still?

 

Another featurette, made to promote DeMille's Cleopatra (1934):

 

that is something really special, how things changed from those days to the fast impact of snippets you see on todays movie trailers !

 

Director Frank Tashlin can be seen very briefly at the beginning