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Chevrolet Leader News (Vol. 2, No. 3)

19369 min 7 sec58 shots

This 1936 promotional newsreel combines comic human-interest stories with demonstrations of Chevrolet automobiles. At a swimming pool, women use a car’s steel roof and attached slide as a diving platform, while jokes about swimsuits and streamlining turn the stunt into a display of the enclosed body. A second segment says that carpenter Hiram Doner drove his 1913 automobile 250,000 miles without an accident and spent very little on repairs before he and his wife receive the keys to a new 1936 Chevrolet.

At a packed stadium in Flint, Michigan, the film identifies Jack Dempsey as the referee for boys’ preliminary boxing and bouts between automobile-company employees. Factory footage introduces James Scott as a 22-year-old worker whose height of seven feet three inches makes it easy for him to inspect steel car roofs. Fishing stories follow an Outdoor Life editor over rough Ozark roads and then show a car driven into a northern Michigan stream to catch smelt inside its watertight body.

The final comedy stages an outdoor tea party for dogs, some of which arrive by car and crowd around a table of food. A child closes the party by scolding the dogs for having no manners. Across these unrelated stories, Chevrolet cars serve as diving platforms, gifts, rough-road transportation, fishing equipment, and props for social comedy.

Provenance and rights

Original producer: Handy (Jam) Organization
Collection: Prelinger Archives
Original title: Chevrolet Leader News (Vol. 2, No. 3)
Date: 1936
Original link: Open on Internet Archive
Rights: public_domain