Slogan (1969)

Advertising is perhaps the most superficial art form known to man. The entire object of the genre is to induce its audience to consume goods or services that previously they had not been aware they desired. The craftsmen of this baldly manipulative field of endeavor are exposed in Slogan (1969) to be precisely as shallow and impulse-driven as the messages they strive to pitch. An award-winning French ad man travels to Venice to be feted for his contributions to the ephemeral literature of salesmanship. Freshly applauded, he meets an unattached, eminently attachable Englishwoman and determines that he must possess her. His desire has been aroused; nothing else matters--not his finances, which he imperils to set up his new toy in an apartment of her own; not his pregnant wife, whom he abandons in the flush of a new pursuit. When the Englishwoman turns out to be a person rather than a commodity and leaves the huckster in favor of a speed racer, the master manipulator has only himself left to con.