Drink whiskey and dance! This simple advertisement for the beloved brand of scotch was among the first wave of motion picture commercials.
Home Media Availability: Stream courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.
Clink, Clink, Another Drink
In the 1890s, the world went movie mad. To briefly summarize where we are in the history of cinema, movies jumped from the peepshow to the projected screen in late 1895 and became a worldwide phenomenon in 1896. Crowned heads and presidents enjoyed picture shows and were filmed themselves. Celebrities had consented to being filmed since the early peepshow days and their projected exploits were covered breathlessly in newspapers. By 1897, it was clear that movies were there to stay and experimentation continued at a wild pace. Historian Charles Musser calls it “cinema’s novelty year.”
The 1890s also saw the rise of movies as political propaganda, with the Spanish-American War and the Dreyfus Affair both breathlessly documented and reenacted in real time, and the rise of movies as advertising. The latter is obviously our subject today, with a popular whiskey distiller being among the first out of the gate.
The John Dewar & Sons scotch whiskey distilling company and the modern advertising industry both got their starts in the mid-nineteenth century and were established but still fairly young when movies entered the scene. Dewar’s took full advantage of the new advertising methods and made sure to market its Scottish origins to the American market.
The United States was not yet in the throes of kilt-mania, the boom for Scottish film subjects would really take off in the 1910s and kilts were widely worn by American boys prior to that, but Scottishisms were pop culture staples and the branding was successful and Dewar’s leaned heavily into all things kilted and plaid. An 1896 item in Billboard Advertising states that “Dewar’s Scotch Whiskey has a handsome four-sheet showing a young swell’s ancestors reaching down out of their portrait frames for some of the whiskey which the young man is sampling.”
The young man in the ad is himself wearing a kilt and all of his kilted and tartaned ancestors (with a bewigged Restoration era aristocrat in the mix for good measure) are practically breaking their picture frames to get a glass of the stuff. Quite an accomplishment for a company founded in the 1840s.
So, the 1897 advertising motion picture, which likely never had a formal title and is now simply known as Dewar’s Scotch Whiskey, was very much in the Dewar’s house style. It has no particular plot, with what the National Library of Scotland dryly describes as “kilted pastiche Scotsman” performing some semblance of a Highland Fling with Dewar’s Scotch Whiskey printed on a banner in the background.
In The Emergence of Cinema, Musser states that the film was not planned for either peepshows or movie screens as we know them. It was projected onto a billboard as a moving advertisement, an extension of what was already being done with magic lantern slides. Dewar’s also filmed a live version of their Whiskey of His Ancestors Campaign, concluding the film with a patriotic salute to then-reigning Queen Victoria. Since the background of Dewar’s Scotch Whiskey resembles picture frames, I wonder if both ads were shot at the same time.
The International Film Co., which produced the Dewar’s Scotch Whiskey ad, was one of many companies that cropped up in the wake of cinema’s wave of popularity. Founded in 1896 by James Webster and Edmund Kuhn, the company had initially started as a house for dupes of Edison releases that were not under copyright, quickly expanding into selling their own productions and projectors.
Edison had famously hoped to control the motion picture industry through his patented film and projection equipment and began striking out at unwelcome competitors. International was the first company targeted in late 1897 and, rather than fighting it out in court, it closed up shop and left the industry by 1898.
A bold-faced advertisement from a forgotten and short-lived production house, Dewar’s Scotch Whiskey has experienced a surprising encore. Sources aimed at general audiences frequently list it specifically as the first advertising film, and that claim is an excellent example of the simplification and survival bias in popular film history.
Dewar’s was part of a wave of movie advertisements but it is unique in that both the brand and the film are still with us, with the brand being recognizable to the layman. Further, the Dewar’s film has been a staple presence in early cinema home video collections. On the other hand, Admiral Cigarette, an advertising film also released in 1897, is extant and available but the company and product that it was selling are long dead.
A 1946 retrospective in Business Screen Magazine mentions Dewar’s, Maillard’s Chocolate (Maillard is now known for his reaction rather than his confections), and Columbia bicycles (the brand was purchased but still exists) as being among the first brands with movie advertisements. The Film Council of America’s 1956 symposium Sixty Years of 16mm Film, 1923-1983 mentions Columbia and Dewar’s as being among the 1897 advertising pioneers, dropping mention of Maillard’s but still making it clear that Dewar’s was not alone. Later academic sources follow this pattern as pinning down the exact release dates of advertising films can be a challenge.
The crediting of film advertising to Dewar’s alone in more pop culture-flavored film history sources seems to have started with an article published in the May 27, 1939 issue of Business Week, Lights! Camera! Sales!, covering film advertising. It opens by stating that Dewar’s used a peepshow to advertise their scotch in 1894 after a Dewar’s distributor saw the machines in action on Broadway. The article then states “Business Week has no intention of throwing out rash claims that this was the first commercial movie. Some-one is sure to bob up with one earlier.” So, Business Week did their duty in this matter. However, their confidence in the reading comprehension of their audience was misplaced.
This article was cited in the 1940 issue of Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, which made no claims of firsts and merely stated “It is usually a surprise to even those connected with our industry to learn that the virtues of Dewar’s Scotch Whiskey were extolled in a business film in 1894” but it did emphasize Dewar’s above all other brands. A 1940 issue of Sales Management took it further, stating that the Dewar’s ad was “generally credited to be the first ‘advertising’ movie.”
Within a few decades, the caveats dropped even in film history spaces, the 1894 peepshow was forgotten and “first movie ad” was pinned onto the earliest surviving Dewar’s commercial, the 1897 Highland Fling ad. The ad has reasonably inoffensive cultural stereotypes, it’s energetic, and the product is still with us and is not controversial in the way cigarettes are now. It’s a perfect storm for pinning “first” on the film that kind of has the right vibe.
Dewar’s Scotch Whiskey is amusing the way all vintage ads are: how little we have changed! However, its strange journey into the valley of dubious firsts is even more interesting.
Where can I see it?
Stream courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.
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