Frigidaire Finale (in the Ephemeral section of Open Video Project. Also, film #5 on Our Secret Century, Volume One: The Rainbow Is Yours CD-ROM (Voyager). Also, film #566 on Prelinger Archive). [Category: Commercial]

This short film, designed to introduce the 1956 Frigidaire product line, is all style over substance. It's style over everything, in fact––there's no narration, no product information of any kind, just music and a glamorously-dressed couple dancing around appliances. Did people really get this excited about stoves and refrigerators?

Highlights:

• The big highlight of the display is a black refrigerator! The reproductions of print ads provided as reference on the CD-ROM shows that this model really was sold. But to whom? In all my born days, I've never known anybody who had a black refrigerator.
  
• There's a really weird Freudian moment when the male dancer tries to get close to the female dancer, only to end up with a bin full of ice cubes. The producers had to know what they were doing here––the reference to "frigidity" is just too obvious. But what is this doing in a sales film probably targeted at women?
  
• This product line was called "The Sheer Look" for no possible reason I could discern. Even the female dancer's dress wasn't sheer, much less the appliances.
  

Ratings: Camp/Humor Value: ***. Weirdness: ****. Historical Interest: *****. Overall Rating: ***.