Brighter Day in Your Kitchen (film #251 on Prelinger Archive). [Category: Industrial]

Ah, now this is the kind of film I love––a cheesy housewife film hawking food products! This film, sponsored by Beatrice Foods, showcases the Beatrice Foods Test Kitchen, which is just like an ordinary 50s kitchen, except it contains a laboratory any mad scientist would be proud of and the women in it get paid to cook. However, in all other ways it tries to be as much like a home kitchen as possible, right down to having Dick York around to be the requisite teenage boy with an appetite like an entire army, who spends his time stealing freshly-baked cookies, crashing the clubwomen’s test luncheon after he’s already eaten a full meal at the workingmen’s test dinner, and hitting up on any teenage daughters the clubwomen drag along to the luncheon. This is really like a filmed recipe booklet (another obsession of mine), containing disgusting-looking meals, Jell-O molds, a housewife in an all-metal 50s kitchen, dinette sets and dishes that fetch high prices on ebay nowadays, and, since its sponsored by Beatrice, an insistence that as many dairy products as possible be served every day. To top it off, there’s a whole section on ice cream desserts at the end, which tipped the star rating to 5 for me, since ice cream is my favorite food. And there’s an incredibly cheesy organ soundtrack. Plus the film is very very mstable. Viewers with tastes different from my own may not like this film as much, but for me, it has everything.

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