A NOTE ABOUT OUR PRINT:

The version of the film being sold on CartoonBrewFilms is taken from an old video transfer from the director’s personal collection. Picture quality is not perfect and there are occasional glitches, but it is the only known existing version at the moment.

Credits

Produced by Stars and Stripes Productions Forever, Inc.
for Lehigh Safety Shoe Company
Director, Designer, Producer: Leonard Glasser
Executive Producer: Robert Staats
Animation: Al Charito, Vincent Bell, Vincent Cafarelli
Script: Peter Nord
The Poet: Al Kelly
The Pitchman: Robert Staats
The Hammerer: Mitchell Rose
Voices: Chuck McCann, Len Glasser, Len Maxwell
Live-action Photography: Len Glasser, Ted Nemeth
Still Photography: Ray Porter
Music: Grant-Murtaugh Productions

Film Notes

Positively our most neglected article of clothing, proclaims the film Safety Shoes (1965), an outlandish anything-goes celebration of safety footwear (you heard right…safety footwear). In the early-’60s, the Lehigh Safety Shoe Company had already produced an educational short that advertised safety shoes, but predictably, nobody wanted to sit through a film about shoes. Safety Shoes director Leonard Glasser, who directed and produced the film at his New York studio Stars and Stripes Productions Forever Inc., recalls seeing Lehigh’s earlier film about safety shoes, and describes it as dry and witless, and starring a Lyndon Johnson lookalike to boot. It was “about as deadly as a film could be,” he recalls. “There was a story about a worker who became crippled because he didn’t wear safety shoes and his family began to starve because he couldn’t work anymore.”

Glasser decided to get rid of the conventional narrative structure and instead put on a fast-paced variety show about shoes. Co-writing the film with Peter Nord, a copywriter at the New York ad agency Hicks & Greist, Glasser concocted a goofy series of animated bits and live-action skits designed to entertain the factory workers who were forced to watch these films during their lunch breaks.

The loose free-form structure of the material would seem to make Safety Shoes a predecessor of TV shows like Monty Python and Laugh-In but the film had its roots in an earlier bit of inspired lunacy—Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson’s stage play Hellzapoppin. Glasser says, “I’d seen a peformance of the play at the Earl Theatre in Philadelphia. They’d be doing one crazy burlesque bit, and that would be interrupted by another bit. I loved that kind of anarchy; I had never seen anything so insane in my life.”

The version of Safety Shoes offered on BrewFilms is 12-1/2 minutes, but the original cut of the film was over forty minutes. The entire film was produced on a barebones budget of $16,000, an obscenely low sum even for the mid-1960s. To cut down on costs, Glasser used live-action footage of a man hammering away at people’s feet, a random piece of footage he’d shot a few years earlier just for fun.

The delightfully smarmy shoe salesman who appears in the film was Glasser’s business partner at the time, Robert Staats. Glasser first connected with Staats through a friend in the military who had served under Staats, an acting sergeant at the time. The role of salesman came naturally to Staats, who Glasser says was an ex-carnival barker and the type of guy who “could sell you an empty box and make you feel good about it.”

Some of the voices in the cartoon were provided by famed New York actor and children’s TV host Chuck McCann, who would later star with Bob Staats in the cult live-action feature The Comeback Trail (1982). The live-action actor at the beginning of the film was Al Kelly, the double-talk specialist who appeared regularly on Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater radio show in the late-1940s.

Although Safety Shoes was produced in less than a couple months, the film became a calling card for Glasser’s company in the late-1960s. “Safety Shoes got most of our work with agencies. Everybody loved it,” he recalls. A Manhattan theater even played the film nightly in front of its features, proving that a film about shoes can indeed be entertaining. —Amid Amidi

About the Director: Leonard Glasser

As a teenager, Leonard Glasser (b. 1935) played drums professionally in various jazz clubs around Philadelphia. “I was working my way through college playing drums,” he says. “It was my life. I wanted to be a jazz musician.” While playing drums, Glasser was attending the Philadelphia Museum School of Art where he studied with painters Melville Price and Franz Kline and designers Armin Hoffman and S. Neil Fujita. After graduating in 1956, he began working in animation on the Terrytoons series Tom Terrific.

In the late-1950s, he began working closely with filmmaker Ernest Pintoff, designing Pintoff shorts like The Interview (1960) and The Old Man and The Flower (1962) and collaborating on the scripts for Pintoff’s early live-action efforts like The Shoes (1962). Glasser started his own studio—Stars and Stripes Productions Forever Inc.—in 1962 with partners Tony Silano and Jose Ferro. Glasser directed some of the most offbeat and original commercials of the Sixties, both animated and live-action, including comically chaotic spots for Country Corn Flakes and Resdan Dandruff Shampoo. Stars and Stripes shut down in the early-1970s.

Glasser has amassed a diverse array of accomplishments over the years. They include working at animation studios such as Perpetual Motion Pictures, Hanna-Barbera, Klasky Csupo, Elektra Films and Fred Calvert Productions; directing and designing the notorious animated sequence for the X-rated feature The Telephone Book (1971), writing and drawing a regular comic strip in The National Lampoon (”The Rabbit Boy”) and writing two live-action features (Mojave Moon, Out Cold). Today, Glasser continues to work full-time on film projects as well as designing and creating metal sculptures which can be found in numerous private art collections.