Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows a silent black-and-white cinema advertisement for Life Saver sweets. It opens with a shot of a poster advertising Life Savers. The remainder of the poorly conserved footage comprises the narrative of a rescue from the water of a woman who has feigned drowning in order to attract the attention of a male lifesaver. After rescuing the woman the lifesaver revives her with a Life Saver and she agrees when he says, via an intertitle, ‘Good, ain’t they? huh!’

Educational value points

• In silent films, gesture and expression, which often seem exaggerated and repetitive to contemporary audiences, were necessary to indicate motive and emotion, given that the bulky cameras of the time were seldom used for close-ups and mid-shots. Sound films took over silent ones in the mid-1930s after the success of the first feature-length sound film, The Jazz Singer (1927), and became known as ‘talkies’.

• Life Saver mints, the subject of this clip, were created in 1912 by Clarence Crane, a producer of chocolates in Cleveland, Ohio. The following year Edward Noble bought the formula, manufactured the sweets, and had them sold as Pep-O-Mint Life Savers. He established the Mint Products Company in New York City. With takeovers in the confectionary industry the formula has been resold many times but Life Savers survives as a distinctive product.

• By the 1930s swimming at the beach or ‘surf bathing’ had become a popular form of recreation. In the 1920s and 30s the beach and forms of exercise such as swimming were promoted as healthy, with the eugenic and physical culture movements linking physical fitness to mental health and to the strengthening of the nation.

• This advertisement shows an enduring example of good product design: the ring shape of Life Savers represents a miniature ‘life preserver’ (a life buoy, vest or jacket), a safety device that originated in the mid-19th century. The sale of Life Savers in small aluminium-foil rolls contributed to their distinctive branding. Edward Noble encouraged retailers to place them next to their registers to promote them and increase sales, a practice still common today.

• This clip is an early example of cinematic advertising. Cinemas offered a new type of venue and form of advertising in the early 20th century. Both the branding and the narrative focus on the Life Saver v lifesaver pun, evident also in the ring shape of the mint sweets. The clip starts with a poster-style screen and moves into a hero-saves-heroine narrative typical of the day. Throughout, the key aim is to tempt the viewer to try a Life Saver.

• Swimming costumes worn in the 1920s are illustrated in the clip. State and council laws dating back to 1907 required costumes to extend from neck to knee. By the late 1920s, however, beachgoers had started wearing less modest outfits. Men often rolled their costumes down to their waists, even though it was illegal for them to wear topless swimming costumes on beaches until the 1930s.

• By the 1930s, beach culture was becoming an entrenched part of the Australian way of life, with the iconic figure of the bronzed Australian surfer, inspired by images of surf lifesaving, emerging as a symbol of nationhood. The beach, a public space offering the pleasures of sun, sea and surf to all, came to be regarded as a symbol of Australian egalitarianism. However, the Surf Life Saving Association did not permit women to join as full members until mid-1980.