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One of Canada's Leading Hotels

Accession number: 
1919.0007

Sponsors:

Producers:

Production Years: 
1919
Release Year: 

Languages:

Film Properties: 
Bibliography: 

Louis Pelletier, "Useful Cinema, Film Genres, and Screen Networks: The Story of Canadian Films Limited (1919-1920)," The Moving Image 11, no. 3 (2011): 72-73.
"The last production completed by Canadian Films in its first year of operation, another industrial/promotional sponsored film entitled One of Canada’s Leading Hotels, might have been saved from some other questionable editorial choices on Canadian Films’ part through exchanges between producer and sponsor. Available documents show a definite shift of emphasis between the project first presented by Canadian Films to the Windsor Hotel and the completed film. Here’s how Canadian Films first pitched the project to Montreal’s famous Windsor Hotel:
Many people, not knowing the whys and wherefores, are amazed at the present day prices charged in hotels for rooms and food. They are not aware of the sanitary precautions taken at large expense, the theft and destruction by certain patrons of linen and equipment, the loss of silver and many other such things that occur; and they would be interested to know how goods are received for the kitchen, how distributed and what disposition is made of the garbage and grease. . . . One or two meetings of employees shown receiving instructions and exchanging ideas would be astonishing news to multitudes.
A list of titles prepared for the completed film, however, reveals that, in all probability heeding the hotel management’s good advice, Canadian Films shifted the film’s emphasis over the course of production from theft and grease disposal to some more glamorous sights, such as the chef’s 'fancy granulated sugar work' and the establishment’s celebrated 'Peacock Alley and Dining Halls.' This still did not help Canadian Films secure theatrical distribution for this production which, for once, had been completed within a month of the contract’s signature on November 26, 1919. One of Canada’s Leading Hotels seems to have been exhibited just once, in June of 1920, to the employees of the Windsor Hotel. In this manner, this film, which had been conceived as a promotional sponsored film and then produced as an industrial film, finally found a limited audience by being made to function more like a home movie.
Canadian Films’ continued failure to get its films the wide release it had contractually bound itself to provide meant that it could not go on producing industrial sponsored films for very long. Lack of distribution not only deprived Canadian Films of a much-needed stream of revenue (the producer’s representatives often claimed that the sponsors’ contributions did not even cover production costs); it also put the company in a difficult position vis-à-vis prospective sponsors."