The Navy film How to Succeed with Brunettes teaches male officers how to behave like gentlemen, but what were the military’s expectations for the many female recruits? Once again, staff in NARA’s Motion Picture Preservation Lab and Special Media’s Motion Picture, Sound, and Video Branch were able to find the answer in the large accession of films received from the Defense Visual Information Center (DVIC).
In 1970, the Army began using a series of three training films produced for the Women’s Army Corps (WAC). These films, released as the Military Etiquette and Grooming series, had a very specific goal. The Film Treatment for the series (found in the production files received from DVIC) notes that...

This week’s guest post is from Audrey Amidon.  Audrey is a Preservation Specialist in NARA’s Motion Picture Preservation Lab.
How to Succeed with Brunettes (1967) and Return of Count Spirochete (1973):
The Motion Picture Preservation Lab’s Favorite Titles from the DVIC Accession
Sure, the National Archives holds films a lot of really important historical films.  Beautifully made educational films about government programs during the Great Depression?  Yeah, we’ve got that.  Millions of feet of material covering every 20th Century war or conflict?  Check!  Films documenting the Civil Rights movement, space exploration, or presidential speeches?  Check, check, and check.

"The instructors at I.V.P. tended to present the outside world as a place of unrelenting menace, of career-ruining faux pas and ego-bruising mistakes. To believe them is to see life, like the surrounding high-altitude landscape, as precipitous. Pastry is 'deadly' for carpets. Lilies, with their impolitely strong fragrance and orange pollen ('worse than saffron'), are to be avoided, as are, at cocktail parties, candles, which Neri described with a pained reverie suggesting personal experience with dozens of Savonnerie carpets disfigured by hot wax. 'Unless,' she added, 'you’re at the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.' Her students dutifully recorded the comment, failing to recognize it as a joke and interpreting it instead as useful advice for the type of person who might plausibly host drinks at a UNESCO World Heritage Site."

A few months ago I read that officials at the Cabinet Office had been ordered not to send internal emails for a day because they'd become "overwhelmed and bombarded" by unnecessary messages. Guardian blogger Guy Browning gave his take on it here. I'm sure this is something every professional can relate to, not least of all those who are running burgeoning small businesses.

As someone whose job involves developing new and more efficient ways of communicating in the workplace, it seems crazy to me that the first method that still springs to mind for most is email. It is, in my opinion, the ongoing communication frontier that needs to be wrangled into submission. While I'm not labelling it as the root of all evil, we all know it can be hard to stay on top of that overflowing inbox and it's easy to ignore other, more efficient ways of communicating and collaborating effectively in the workplace.

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