Advertisement (1981)

D. Malcolm McClaren
Colour and B&W


I suppose it’s easy to see the attraction Orson Welles and Malcolm McClaren must have felt for each other. Have there ever been two more arch pranksters? Have two men ever greeted failure with a more knowing smile and a glint in the eye which suggested it was all actually planned? A collaboration, when you stop to think about it, seems obvious. But if they were to make a film together, who’d have put money on Malcolm McClaren handling the directing?


This is a genuine curio, an oddity even stranger than Welles’ own ‘F for Fake’. Clearly inspired by Welles’ tribulations when hawking frozen peas a few years prior, ‘Advertisement’ finds him pushing a vast array of different products. Here he is stood in a bowling alley, marching up from the pins and extolling Pepsi Cola in that honeyed voice of his; while there he is explaining his lovely waistline with reference to Big Macs, while a mime artist dressed as Ronald McDonald is beaten up behind him.


Yes, these are real products and the idea seems to have been that the film would be part funded by having the companies themselves take their little segments and screen them as part of an advertising campaign.


That, of course, never happened – hence why this film remains so lost and neglected (but this blog exists for neglected films). Surely the two of them could have guessed that a portly washed up Hollywood trouble maker, no matter how fascinating and charismatic he remained, was not the best pitch person for a bunch of random products. Particularly as a great many of these items are provincially British based, thus limiting the market of potential buyers even further. While McClaren’s offbeat visual style, and the need both of them seem to have to subvert these products even whilst selling them, means that it’s unlikely that any gaudy braces sporting Don Draper would have snapped these promos up.


Oddest moment? I think that’s a choice between Welles posing in a giant nappy and waving a rattle, telling us how much he adores Farley’s Rusks; or Welles standing side by side with Sid Vicious – in a segment filmed in 1978 – waxing lyrically about the virtues of Mars bars while young Sid stuffs his sneering face full.


It’s a small monument to how much Welles adored Europe and how that adoration led him down lots of odd little (sometimes completely blind) alleyways. He’s never a boring watch and it’s another example of how his talents are never truly wasted, even when the film around him is clearly and utterly not worthy of him. And it’s once again Orson Welles (and Malcolm McClaren too) going off on a mad adventure of his own and not caring about the consequences.


‘Advertisement’ is definitely not without interest, but a 78 minute string of commercials is tough to watch in one go, no matter who the pitchman is.