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Steel: Man’s Servant (1938)
Sponsor: United States Steel Corp. of Delaware. Production Co.: Roland Reed Productions. Director: Roland Reed. Camera: Charles Boyle. Music: Robert Armbruster. Narrator: Edwin C. Hill. Transfer Note: Scanned from a 16mm print held by Orgone Archive. Running Time: 37 minutes.
Highly praised industrial film showing the production of steel. Steel: Man’s Servant was shot in U.S. Steel mines and mills in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania and was considered by documentarian Pare Lorentz “the most beautiful color picture ever made” (Business Screen 1, no. 2).
Note: Produced in 35mm three-strip Technicolor at a cost of $250,000. Steel: Man’s Servant was shot in ten weeks and became the company’s major informational film, replacing the six-reel Story of Steel (1926). Steel: Man’s Servant was distributed in many versions: a 16mm Kodachrome version; a theatrical short called Men Make Steel (10 minutes); a black-and-white version for industry viewers (80 minutes); and two other black-and-white versions (66 and 38 minutes). All told, it was reported to have been shown to nearly 10 million viewers during two decades of distribution (Business Screen 21, no. 3). Roland Reed Productions was the industrial film branch of the Hollywood studio Selznick International Pictures.
Resources
“Technicolor Tells the Story of Steel,” Business Screen 1, no. 1 (1938): 20–21; “Close-ups and Long Shots,” Business Screen 1, no. 2 (1938): 6; “Steel Stars in Two Movies Aided by Music and Color,” Christian Science Monitor, Apr. 26, 1938, 3; “On the Business Horizon,” Barron’s, July 25, 1938, 5; “Camera! Action! Sales!,” Business Week, May 27, 1939, 37–47; Educational Film Catalog, comps. Dorothy E. Cook and Eva Rahbek-Smith (New York: H.W. Wilson Co., 1939), 204; “Over 13 Million View U.S. Steel Films,” Business Screen 21, no. 3 (1960): 22; Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), 227; William L. Bird Jr., “Better Living”: Advertising, Media, and the New Vocabulary of Business Leadership, 1935–1955 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 137–38.