Your Thrift Habits 1948

[Chronic]

Documentary style film teaching the benifits of making and sticking to a budget. 1948





Almost all of the Coronet films produced between 1946 and 1956 feature dramatic storylines and a cast of characters that resemble their intended audience. Their narratives generally show children or adolescents learning how to understand something (rather than just learning a set of facts) and thus express great moral gravity. Your Thrift Habits, one of a number of films designed to influence the development of healthy spending practices, works just this way.
Jack's healthy interest in photography and his desire to buy a camera just like Ralph's invokes a moral tale practically equal to Ben Franklin's autobiography. As if goaded by the mocking voice of the narrator, Jack reforms his profligate spending habits with the aid of a budget. Guided, no doubt, by a mandate to practice visual means of instruction, this film has Jack inventing a "cameragraph" as a kind of progress gauge of his savings. Compliance with his budget brings happy results.
Although the mental predilection to save money resides in a deep and mysterious place, it's more likely that this film expresses reactions to the financial instability brought on by the Depression just a decade earlier. The bright new postwar world of consumer goods bore the same temporal relation to economic privation as, say, 1986 does to today.


Ken Smith notes: Irresponsible "Jack" is envious of the camera that sensible "Ralph" has just purchased. How can Jack possibly save the money he needs to buy one for himself? "Are budgets just for parents?" the narrator asks, mockingly. "If he'd do without extravagances he could save every week!" Jack concedes that he should learn to budget his income, so he devises a "cameragraph" and attempts to follow it. This isn't always easy, but the narrator is always on hand to humiliate Jack whenever greed and gluttony surface. "Too many movies! Too much candy!" he chides. "You can't have EVERYTHING you want!" Needless to say, Jack does finally save enough money to buy his camera -- and probably had a good laugh at this film once the unthrifty fifties got rolling.