Here's an animation mystery – at least for me. My buddy Steve gave me a fist full of these odd pocket sized magazines from the 1950s, and one of them, the Sept. 24, 1955 edition of "Picture Week," had this spread about a cartoon short based on the Kinsey Report.
I've never heard of the studio that produced it, Kingsley-International Productions.
I was intrigued. When I did a little researching, I discovered there wasn't much info on it except for a notation on the BFI site stating it had a running time of a 13 minutes.
The artwork certainly has a UPA/ Jules Feiffer look to it, but again I ran up against a dead end.
Has anyone see this short?
7 comments:
The film was mentioned in the Dec 3 1955 issue of Boxoffice, page 1885 (possibly where BFI found it?)
"Report on Love
Edward Kingsley (Animated Fim Short) 15 Mins.
Very Good. Although the subject matter makes it best suited to art houses, this cartoon subject is an entertaining digest on the finds of the Kinsey Reports, which were front page news when they were published a few years back. Produced by Alexander d'Arbeloff and not filmed with the cooperation of Dr. Alfred E. Ktnsey (although he later approved the film), the subject is a whimsical and tasteful visual treatment of an extremely touchy subject: sex. Done in the style of the UPA cartoons, it will offend no one, if they are old enough to understand it. It's a novel short, in every particular, and rates marquee mention. Kingsley is at 1??1 Broadway, New York City."
[I couldn't decipher the building number]
That should have read "Alfred E Kinsey", of course - my mistake!
Addendum: The last line is "Kingsley is at 1501 Broadway, New York City"
Kingsley International was a Distribution company that imported British and European films. (Mostly 'art house' movies.) It was at the centre of a Supreme Court judgment that overturned the New York Regents' ban on the showing of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" in 1958. Kingsley also co-produced Pintoff's "The Violinist".
Can't find anything for d'Aberloff though.
Thanks!
The Ivy Films DVD of the film "Wife for a Night"(1952) has "Report on Love" as an extra, according to DVD Savant Review - http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s1145wife.html
"Ivy adds two interesting extras, the kind of added attractions that might have been seen in American art theaters where this kind of import played. The first is an Italian concert piece with the Rome Symphony orchestra playing Rossini's Barber of Seville and Beethoven's Prometheus Overture. The quality is fine. The second is a strange little animated film about The Kinsey Report, of all things. It uses cartoons that resemble the work of Jules Feiffer, and recurring closeups of actors pretending to be ordinary people picked out by the narrator's roving eye. The film wants to be open-minded, but is packed with assumptions about male and female roles, and betrays its bias. It repeats the rumor that the extreme sexual behaviors reported by the Kinsey people were the result of interviewing braggarts and extroverts."
Great work! That's for the info!
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