Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco
Admission: $10.00, Limited Seating, RSVP to: 415-558-8117 or RSVP@oddballfilm.com
Admission: $10.00, Limited Seating, RSVP to: 415-558-8117 or RSVP@oddballfilm.com
Highlights Include:
Color For Joy (Color, 1962)
A housewife dances and prances around the house, dyeing everything in sight with RIT fabric dye in this odd promotional film. Stars Patricia Harty, who played Blondie in the late 1960s sitcom, in perhaps her first “dramatic” role. Makes a nice companion piece to Oddball favorite Match My Mood. No housewife has ever been this peppy- not without a handful of leapers!
Men just don't understand! A wife recounts her terrible day of calamities and nuisances to her unsympathetic husband who seems to think this wonder woman is nothing but lazy. Well, he's got it coming, you can count on that!
Poor Mabel Normand, she's married to a drunk and a wimp! Her husband, played by Charlie Chaplin, won't even stand up to an amorous stranger and defend her from his advances. She buys her husband a boxing dummy with the hope it will make a man out of him, but he comes home drunk and mistakes the dummy for the bully and tries to eject it from the house!
Music with Spice - The Man that Comes Around (B+W, 1940s)
A teenage boy sings about all the men that come over to the house after his father leaves for work, while his philandering mother preens herself in the mirror in this scandalous soundie.
How to Undress in Front of Your Husband (B+W, 1937)
An antiquated exercise in exhibitionism starring Elaine Barrie AKA Mrs. John Barrymore (!) wife of the famed Hollywood legend. No wonder she was his last wife!
Cooking: Kitchen Safety (B+W, 1949)
Poor Eleanor; she slipped off her ladder in the kitchen and ended up in the hospital. What a careless woman! Don't you too be just another dumb injured housewife, learn how to cut things without cutting off a finger and other important lessons for us simple women.
Cooking: Kitchen Safety (B+W, 1949)
Poor Eleanor; she slipped off her ladder in the kitchen and ended up in the hospital. What a careless woman! Don't you too be just another dumb injured housewife, learn how to cut things without cutting off a finger and other important lessons for us simple women.
Mystery in the Kitchen (Color, 1958, excerpt)
Produced by the National Film Board of Canada, this soft-boiled film aimed at housewives uses satire and humor to teach proper nutrition and good eating habits by pointing out the subtle poisons you may be subjecting your family to. A well-dressed dapper man slinks around the kitchen and pantry, lecturing a long-suffering mother on how she is responsible for her family's personality problems by denying them nutrients. Beautiful color mid-century domestic scenes from our neighbors to the North.
Battle of the Bulge (B+W, 1950)Part of the Variety View segment, this antiquated and offensive short aims to keep women in their place by joking about their rotundness and their men's displeasure. The narrator follows several women who are overweight and offers various advice and instructions on how to thin down for your ungrateful husband!
Curator’s Biography
Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009.
About Oddball Films
Oddball films is the film component of Oddball Film+Video, a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Summer of Love, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.
Our films are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.