@AndyPaciorekArt Arthur Lubin's Black Friday (1940) with #Karloff and #Lugosi is wonderful(ly creepy) https://letterboxd.com/film/black-friday/ #cinemastodon #film #FilmNoir #horror

#Bales2023FilmChallenge March 21: Countdown on #NationalCountdownDay

[SPOILER WARNING BELOW]

#Peace, little girl aka Daisy aka Daisy Girl was the #PoliticalAd campaign to end all ad campaigns. It opens innocently enough with a little blonde girl, picking the petals of an ox-eye #daisy while counting. When the final petal's gone, the tone changes completely*

This deceptively simple #propaganda #film was made in support of Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 presidential campaign by ad agency #DBB and media consultant #TonySchwartz. It was so effective and bleak in is insinuations that the Johnson campaign was forced to pull it after only one screening.

What fascinates me is the similarity with one particular scene from James Whale's Frankenstein (1931). The Monster (#Karloff) meets a little girl who sits on the shore of a lake, picking daisies. He approaches her, and the girl, knowing the creature is a good man at heart, invites him to play a game with her involving them tossing the daisies into the lake. <spoiler>When they run out of daisies, the Monster picks up the girl who to him is as pretty and innocent as a flower, and throws her into the water.</spoiler>.

This scene was cut and considered lost until the 1980s. Could Tony Schwartz have been aware of that scene? He was at the right age to have seen the pre-code, pre-cut version.

*Peace, little girl is deceptively simple and only a minute long. However, do watch it on a sunny day: https://www.loc.gov/item/mbrs01185386.

#film #cinema #propaganda #elections #LyndonBJohnson #BarryGoldwater #ColdWar #Vietnam #VietnamWar #politics #FilMastodon #CineMastodon @film https://letterboxd.com/12pt9/list/bales2023filmchallenge/