Sponsored Films

Big Idea (1951)
Sponsor: Swift & Co. Production Co.: Wilding Picture Productions. Director: Edward M. Grabill. Writer: James Prindle. Camera: John Niklasch. Editor: John Cook. Music: Benny Kyte. Cast: Veronica Pataky, Milburn Stone, James Bannon. Transfer Note: Scanned from a 16mm print held by the Library of Congress. Running Time: 43 minutes.

Pro–free enterprise parable sponsored by the large meatpacker as part of a widespread “economic education” campaign. In the dramatization, a woman reporter from an iron curtain country and an American newspaperman, a “fellow traveler,” tour a Swift plant and visit workers’ homes. Together they come to realize that capitalism is the system that provides the greatest degree of worker freedom.

Note: The cast included an estimated 130 Swift employees. Some 28,000 workers and friends attended four screenings at Chicago’s International Amphitheater. Thirty- and 28-minute versions were released for noncommercial screening and broadcast. In the first two years of release, Big Idea reached 3.5 million moviegoers and 13 million television viewers.

Resources
“20,000 Swift Workers to Be Party Guests,” Chicago Tribune, Apr. 8, 1951, WA9; “Swift Premieres Big Idea,” Business Screen 12, no. 2 (1951): 64; “Vast Audience Hears Freedom’s Ring,” Business Screen 12, no. 3 (1951): 29–31; Ray Vicker, “Business Movies, with Low-Keyed Promotion, Win Big TV Audience,” Wall Street Journal, June 25, 1954, 1.