Phonies Beware! (1956) User Reviews

Uh Huh, The FDA Cares

[Calaboss · 5/10 · 27 May 2011]

This short is just a mid-fifties chest-thumping of the Food and Drug Administration. If you were to believe this little 8 minutes of propaganda, the FDA is REALLY busting their butts to protect the consumer.

In this episode, intrepid FDA inspector Kennedy sees a newspaper ad for "Elixir X". Elixir X claims to cure diabetes, kidney disease (and apparently the heebie jeebies and monsters in the closet). The FDA inspector, aka "this man", then goes sleuthing to find out what Elixir X is, what it does, and who's been taking it.

The imaginary John Martin died from taking Elixir X instead of his insulin. John Martin was an idiot, and we're better off without him. The crack team of FDA chemists discover that "X" is just alcohol and water and cures nothing but sobriety. The maker supposedly gets a fine and a year in jail.

Like a lot of these 50's shorts, actors go through the motions on-screen while a narrator, (in this case, Bob Hite) relates the story. Phonies Beware is about average for these "informational" shorts. Thankfully, the popularity of TV killed off these little nuisances by the 1960's.

Men As Symbols, Or Perhaps Cymbals

[boblipton · 5/10 · 3 October 2020]

That's what the narrator tells us at the beginning of this short documentaries about the Food and Drug Administration, that begins with guys eating olives and candling bottles of rum. To the accompaniment of stirring music, an inspector drives in a car with a Federal seal on it to investigation the dire mountebank who sells Elixir-X, good for what ails you.

The FDA has long served a good and useful purpose, but has become onerous and obfuscatory in recent years. That makes my opinion of this movie a thumbs down .

Before he became a U.S. President, American war hero . . .

[oscaralbert · 8/10 · 3 October 2020]

. . . J. F. Kennedy spent a stint as a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspector, busting up a nefarious ring of fake drug makers murdering deceived customers with noxious mixes of contaminated water and fermented backyard weeds, reports PHONIES BEWARE! Back in the 1900s, Oval Office Occupants actually SAVED American lives, instead of telling stricken citizens to "Ingest bleach: Just try it--what do you have to lose?" and watching them perish by the hundreds of thousands. Back in the 1900s, the USA's watchdog agencies such as the FDA were manned by hard-working public servants, rather than Today's corrupt, unqualified political hacks and crony liars, PHONIES BEWARE! reveals. This brief documentary serves to remind Today's viewers that during the 20th Century America was a respectable functioning Democracy--NOT a banana republic with few if any actual bananas!

Bland Short

[Michael_Elliott · 27 May 2011]

Phonies Beware! (1956)

** (out of 4)

Here is yet another bland documentary short from the RKO-Pathe Streamliner series. This time out we're told what the Food and Drug Administration does before we get to the main story, which is an ad in a newspaper that promises to cure a wide range of diseases including diabetes. It turns out that a diabetic ordered the product and died shortly after using it so the FDA agent must follow the evidence to get a conviction. Like most films in the series, this one here is just way too dry and boring to really work even though the actual story is interesting and could have been made into a better film. While watching the short I couldn't help but think MGM's "Crime Does Not Pay" series could have done so much more with the material and the viewer would have been left with a much better film. One of the biggest problems in telling the story the way it's told here is that you have to put some of the blame on the man because he quit taking his insulin shots. As a diabetic I can tell you this would be an incredibly stupid thing to do and once you hear what in the "bottle" sold to the man who can see that it wasn't that which killed him but the fact that he quit taking his shots.