Just Around the Corner: A Bizarre Trip Through Corporate Propaganda

Is it worth your time?

Honestly, only if you have a weird obsession with 1930s branding or just want to see Bette Davis looking slightly confused in a kitchen. If you hate product placement or corporate shills, stay far away. It’s a total relic, but a fascinating one.

So, Just Around the Corner is basically a GE commercial that somehow roped in half of the Warner Bros. roster. You’ve got Joan Blondell and Dick Powell doing their thing, which is usually singing and looking perky. But the real star is the GE refrigerator. It gets more screen time than the lead actors.

The whole premise is that being broke in the Great Depression is easy to fix. You just need the right kitchen setup, apparently. It feels less like a movie and more like a fever dream from a marketing meeting that went on for six days straight.

I couldn't help but laugh at the way the camera lingers on these appliances. It’s like a horror movie where the toaster is the monster, except it’s supposed to be a hero. It reminded me a bit of the weird, staged feeling in The Studio Girl, where everything feels just a little too deliberate.

There’s this one scene where they explain the benefits of electric cooling, and the dialogue is so stiff it might as well be made of plywood. You can practically hear the executives off-screen nodding in approval. It’s not subtle. It doesn't even know what subtle is. It’s aggressive.

Bette Davis shows up, and she’s a pro, but she seems to know she’s in a glorified brochure. There’s a specific look she gives during a kitchen tour that says, 'I am an Oscar winner, why am I petting this stove?' It’s the highlight of the whole thing.

It’s nowhere near as strange or visually ambitious as With Williamson Beneath the Sea, but it has its own kind of weirdness. It’s like watching a commercial for a product that doesn't exist anymore, except the product is the entire concept of the American Dream sold via home goods.

• The singing is actually pretty decent, which makes the hard pivot to appliance specs even funnier.
• The lighting on the refrigerator is better than the lighting on the actors.
• I’m not sure who thought a musical number about a washing machine was a good idea, but here we are.

It’s weirdly hypnotic. You keep watching because you can’t believe they actually made this. It’s a 1933 time capsule that just happens to be made of cold steel and electric coils. 🔌