I watched the short film, "R.F.D. Greenwich Village," on TCM on Sunday, May 15, 2016, with no idea what to expect. It's ostensibly a travelogue about the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, but its blatant commercial message identifies this as a sponsored film with an industry backer. The first inkling is revealed about a minute into it with the line of narration, "Cotton's casual appeal is in step with carefree living." As the film shows the sights of Greenwich Village (but never the sounds), following a prototypical young white couple around on their tour of cafes, gardens, bookstores, parties, brownstones and Washington Square Park, the narration emphasizes their clothing at regular intervals, as in "Freed from conservative business attire, the modern villager finds comfort in cotton corduroy, the fabric woven for the 'now generation,' as ruggedly appealing as the great outdoors, yet sophisticatedly shaped for the modes of cosmopolitan life."
Despite the narration's insistence that "village styles have always been avant-garde, always a step or so before their time," the fashions on display were wildly outdated by the time this film came out. I was stunned to learn from IMDb that the release date was 1969! When I was watching it, I was certain it was much earlier. There are lots of berets, floppy hats and mid-'60s Carnaby Street fashions. There are no signs of hippies, few people of color, no mention at all of the East Village (no St. Mark's Place, no Tompkins Square Park), and, most amazing of all, nothing to indicate that this was the year of Stonewall, for cryin' out loud! The only sign of the social and cultural turbulence of the era is seen in a quick shot of visiting sailors walking past some street graffiti with the peace sign and "Paint Peace" on a wall. (Ironically, it's painted over a slogan, "Down with Gusanos," a derogatory term for anti-Castro Cubans.) Yet the narrator tells us that "Today, Greenwich Village is the postmark for many countrified cosmopolitans, people who prefer small-town casualness to rigid metropolitan dress for men and their suburban counterparts. Manufacturers and designers work around the clock to provide the cotton sportswear and leisure wear they demand for the country life." He also insists that "Here thousands of people live in an atmosphere much like the one they left in their own hometown," something that would have been big news to the people who came to the Village precisely to escape the strictures and prejudices of their hometowns.
The soundtrack is awash with canned commercial music that comes nowhere near to reflecting the musical tastes and styles of Greenwich Village. Even when we see a montage of street performers in Washington Square Park, including a quick shot of Latin drummers, the music doesn't change. The only thematic break in the soundtrack comes during a party scene when we hear a singer with a guitar performing something vaguely folkish that might not have seemed out of place several years earlier.
At the end, we see the credit, "Produced by the Cotton Producers Institute," and I wasn't surprised at all. Why they chose Greenwich Village as a backdrop is puzzling, although I'm guessing it was to convince the rest of America that cotton was "hip," without actually using that word.