Documentaries: Saving Face

Commercial television almost always has second thoughts about getting involved in controversy; sponsors always fear to offend. Thus, the hard-hitting point of view falls to the province of public TV. The educational channels still have far to go before developing consistently top-grade talent and programming, but more and more they are showing that they can handle controversy with skill.

One of public TV’s best programs is a tough, fair-minded National Educational Television series called Your Dollar’s Worth. Screened in different cities at different times, it specializes in consumer reports without sensationalizing the findings. With the help of a hard-digging staff, Executive Producer Harry McCarthy has examined misleading drug and gasoline advertising, exposed crooked TV repairmen and loan sharks, educated viewers on how to buy a used car or a house. Last week the program launched its second season of monthly reports. The first topic was the cosmetics trade.

In earlier investigations of the series, the tone was sometimes indignant. This time, appropriately, there was an aura of bemusement too, an awareness that vanity often takes precedence over common sense. Asked Narrator Dick McCutchen: “If you feel that a $10 jar of something or other has made you look dazzling, and we tell you that it couldn’t have possibly made any difference, except in your mind, does it mean that you have wasted your money?”

The show was well salted with hilarious vignettes of the beauty world. A beauty-counter huckster romanced his customers (“You would be the perfect type for Ultima”), a mincing makeup man proclaimed, “You now look as if you worshiped at the shrine of Aphrodite.” One cosmetics-department manager confided: “If a product sold for 15¢—a face cream—we could not give it away, we couldn’t sell it for 15¢. At $1, there’d be a certain group of customers; at $3, an even wider number of customers—certainly more than at 15¢.” Why? Summed up a psychoanalyst: “An item that promises a fantasy has to be priced fantastically.”

Separating fantasy from fact, the show juxtaposed a cosmetics consultant, urging clients to use a combination of five or six preparations, with a dermatologist who said that one or two would do. Of course, manufacturers know that—and so do women. But as Narrator McCutchen said: “How can there be a reasonable price for a dream?”