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Loucks & Norling StudiosLiving Pages (ca. 1935)

Portrait of the readers of McCall's magazine (housewives) and their lives and desires.


This movie is part of the collection: Prelinger Archives

Producer: Loucks & Norling Studios
Audio/Visual: Sd, B&W
Keywords: Media: Magazines; Gender roles; Consumerism

Creative Commons license: Public Domain

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Reviewer: ERD. - - March 11, 2007
Subject: Living Pages is dead
Extremely dated, pretencious, promotional for McCall's Magazine.

Reviewer: autoguy - - March 10, 2007
Subject: It's lean times!
And ladies, you gots ta gets da mens dat likes dem wimmins wid dere heads full of dat book stuff! Utter nonsense abounds in this desperate attempt to market the magazine in a time when hardly any of the population lived the life depicted is this highly sexist morsel of propaganda. A wealthy mother with three daughters, all seemingly with no jobs and time and money to party all the time, teaches them to throw themselves at any man that comes along with money! Surely, reading McCall's magazine will have the entire female population living the life of leisure that they deserve in no time! It's the depression folks, and extra money to throw away on trashy magazines is getting tight. BUT.. if it can help you land some random sucker with a lot of money? It's worth it! Read McCalls, and start living that life of leisure and luxury that you deserve TODAY!

Reviewer: Marysz - - January 12, 2006
Subject: Housekeeping--the Greatest Occupation?
An interesting, incomplete promotional film for McCall's magazine made during the Depression. The magazine's diffident male editor philosophizes about how his job is to "find the man within" as "life passes in review" around him, along with idealizing the American housewife. Presumably this film was meant for advertisers who couldn't be bothered to read the actual magazine itself. Or could it have been made as a short to be shown in movie theaters to entice women to subscribe? In any case, the film's intent is to bring the magazine to "life." First we see artist Neysa McMein drawing a McCall's cover. Next, the film dramatizes a banal example of McCall's fiction--the travails of the unmarried girls in the Ludlow family and their mother's pressure on them "land" the unsuspecting Dr. Dudley. The film fragment ends with the black maid's soliloquy about how interesting the Ludlow family is and how she's eager to stick around to see what happens. In fact, she probably couldn't wait to get away.

Neysa McMein is the film's most interesting character. McMein was a successful woman illustrator who was a member of the Algonquin Round table. She died in 1949, but her work wasn't honored by the Society of Illustrators until 1986. McMein and her model, financially independent women working outside of the home, present an image of women more compelling than the sentimentalized housewives concocted by McCall's.

Reviewer: Wilford B. Wolf - - September 9, 2005
Subject: Huh...
A rather odd film from the 1930s promoting McCall's. McCall's, along with the Ladies Home Journal, was one of the two seminal "ladies" magazines for most of the 20th century. The magazine was renamed Rosie in the late 1990s and folded around 2000 because of scandal.

This film seems to be incomplete, and it does not help that it meanders. It starts off with the male narrator defining what makes the perfect housewife; concerns about food, shopping, etiquiette, and child rearing. The idealized lives of the upper middle class housewife are shown, and it is throught the pages of McCall's that life was pushed.

Then the typically male editor drones tonelessly about what the magazine means to women. Even though he supposedly dictating a letter, still uses a giant mockup of the magazine to show it's "three magazines in one." He then cuts to the long time cover illustrator Neysa McMein working in her studio. McCall's was notable as one the first places that American female artists and illustrators could find work. McMein and Rose O'Neil (creator of the Kewpie doll) both did a lot of work of the magazine in the 1920s and 1930s.

The narrator then returns and talks about how the magazine also has serialized fiction, I suppose to fulfill the culture the narrator boasted earlier. We are then presented for the rest of the run time a very banal romance, with stiff dialogue and equal acting. Indictive of the level of the story, the last part if the matron of the household talking with a African-American housekeeper in full "mammy" mode philosophizing the foibles of the other characters.

It is at this point that the film ends with no summing or wrapping up, so there might be a second reel lost in the mist somewhere. Even thenm it's hard to figure out what the purpose of this film is. Was it a promo for the magazine to the general public? Was it like "In The Suburbs", an appeal to advertisers? With nothing to tie it all up, one cannot be sure.

Reviewer: Spuzz - - October 29, 2003
Subject: Yes And?
This review of the magazine Mcalls STARTS off fine, detailing what kind of woman reads McCalls (you'd be surprised) and then the editor blabbers on to a secretary about what he wants to do with the magazine, and to top it all off, we'll have the artwork on the cover of this very famous artist.. (forgot her name). The filn tells us that Mcalls also features fiction,. When a dramatization, for a reason never fully explained, of one of their stories is shown. The story is somewhat ok, sort of like little women, where the women chat up about the men coming into their lives (love the male character). But, again, there is no point for this to take up half of the film (which it does) and then fade to black (ditto). Rather strange and pointless.

Shotlist

"Housekeeping still remains the most important business in the world." "Each woman faces it singlehandedly.""She must know clothes, how to buy and how to make them." "She must face death to bring children into the world." Her relationship to her husband: "she must stir his ambition; pull him through failure; and keep success from hurting him."
Young male McCall's editor dictates a piece to his secretary about the role of the editor and his magazine in the world.
McCall's serial (fiction) is brought to life: The women of the house plot to land a young doctor as husband for one of them.
Women fight over dinner. African-American domestic worker philosophizes over the doings of the household.


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