Thursday’s ad is for Rheingold, from 1948. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Rheingold recruited a number of prominent celebrities to do ads for them, all using the tagline: “My beer is Rheingold — the Dry beer!” In this ad, American actor Adolphe Menjou tells the story about the time he was fitted for four suits in a Paris Railway as an illustration of how much of a connoisseur he is, beer connoisseur even, and declaring Rheingold Extra Dry the best.
Menjou also appeared in a second ad that same year. In this second ad, he talks about how once he was introduced to collecting things, like stamps, he just went nuts, and the same was true when he was introduced to Rheingold Extra Dry.
If there’s ONE person in all of these very interesting ads whom I doubt EVER even drank beer it’s this self-styled bon vivant. Wonder how much they paid him.
Maybe they bought him more new suits? “Truth in advertising” didn’t matter then, & still doesn’t, even tho there are extant laws now that intend to protect us from blatant BS (which Jim Koch violated w/his “I brew the best beer in America” pitch for Sam Adams Boston Lager – at a time when there were at least 100 BETTER craft brews being made in CA/OR/WA & whose ads were word of mouth amongst beer geeks or 1/8 page in local “brewspapers”).