Amazon.com essential video: As Victor Norman, Clark Gable plays a returning World War II vet looking for a job with an advertising agency. He succeeds, landing a good position with a nice salary, but soon finds out that ethics and integrity are in short supply in the rarefied world of corporate advertising. With a big soap account on the brink of leaving the ad agency, things get a bit desperate as the agency struggles to hang onto the company's business. They round up a war widow for an endorsement, and their client is temporarily happy, but soon Gable finds the man to be a harsh and demanding taskmaster. This acerbic comedy may seem a little thin by today's standards, but some of the commentary on the gullibility of the American buying public is still pretty fresh half a century later. Sydney Greenstreet excels as the tyrannical, somewhat disgusting head of the soap firm, and Deborah Kerr makes her American screen debut as Gable's war-widow love interest. --Jerry Renshaw
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Rating: - Devastating 1940s Classic on the Advertising Game -- Why No DVD?
Every veteran of the advertising industry is sure to find lots to enjoy and ponder in this Clark Gable-Debra Kerr classic. The Hucksters was an adaptation of Frederic Wakeman's devastating novel -- rumored to be a roman a clef -- about big-bucks corporate thuggery and Mad Ave skullduggery in the 1940s.
Returning ad executive Clark Gable and impoverished war-widow socialite Debra Kerr try to hang onto their integrity and each other in the freewheeling, utterly unprincipled world of Madison Avenue in the years after World War 2. They negotiate a minefield of high-stakes ad campaigns, ... Read More
Rating: - A Compelling Movie of Chesslike Stratagems
The Hucksters does an excellent job of portraying the cut throat business that advertising is. Clark Gable, playing the suave but ethical advertising man, is the protagonist and he is pitted against the larger than life business tycoon Sydney Greenstreet. Both are pitted against one another in this real life chess match, each making strategic moves of cunning, self-pride and power--Gable, in an attempt at making the advertising business a respectable one and Greenstreet by instilling fear into the bumbling idiots who surround him. Greenstreet operates as though his customers are mindless sheep ... Read More
Rating: - Absorbing drama
"The Hucksters" is a refreshingly adult drama with themes that resonate even today. Clark Gable plays an advertising agent (a "huckster") who is basically a decent man, but who finds himself increasingly compromising his principles in order to satisfy a despotic soap magnate played by Sydney Greenstreet, who obviously relishes in playing such a despicable, larger than life character.
As part of a promotion for his client's product, Gable convinces a lovely society war widow (sensitively played by Deborah Kerr) to endorse Greenstreet's beauty soap. Gable is immediately attracted to Kerr ... Read More
Rating: - "And Mr. Evans, Your Ad is Not Clean."
The summation of ad man Clark Gable's reading of the riot act to soap magnate Sydney Greenstreet is just great in this a-one movie about the post-war radio advertising world. Gable has just hung up his uniform--literally--when the show begins, and is ready to resume his radio ad man career. Along the way, he has to tangle with Greenstreet, a really dopey Keenan Wynn, and decide which of two lovely ladies he wants to pursue. Quite a dilemma: the upper-crust war widow Deborah Kerr who seems like she'd be made of ice but is surprisingly warm to the touch, or sultry torch singer Ava Gardner, who might seem ... Read More
Rating: - CLARK AND KERR
Clark Gable zoomed back to the pre-eminent place he long held in Hollywood with this smash performance of Vic Norman, the attractive "huckster"; a radio advertising go-getter. He takes with him the lovely English Deborah Kerr, who made her American film debut in this film from 1947. Nearly everyone read the book by Frederic Wakeman back in the forties; it was very popular. The Gable-Kerr team is ideal. Kerr made an impressive bow on the U.S. screen, and the critics took notice. Sydney Greenstreet is great as Evan Llewellyn Evans, who thinks America as a blank space between New York and Hollywood where ... Read More
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