The most wanted man in America is making a visit to the Hagley Vault today. This ca. 1950 clip, starring Don Ameche, is from a larger film sponsored by the Cleveland-based Scott & Fetzer Company. The company was founded in the early 1920s to manufacture vacuum cleaners designed by local inventor James B. Kirby.
By the time the company contracted Cinecraft Productions to produce this training and recruitment video for sales staff, the Scott & Fetzer Company had thousands of salespeople selling the vacuum cleaners door to door.
This film is part of Hagley Library's collection of Cinecraft Productions films (Accession 2019.227). Cinecraft Productions is a Cleveland production company founded in 1939 by Ray Culley (1904-1983) and Betty (Buehner) Culley (1914-2016).
The company, which still operates today, specialized in commercial productions for business, industry, trade organizations, and, in some cases, government agencies and social service organizations, work that currently allows it to proclaim itself the “country's longest-standing corporate film & video production house.”
The collection includes motion pictures, still images, scripts and related production documents from the company's founding into the early 1980s with the bulk covering the 1950s to the 1970s. The collection has not been digitized in its entirety but we are currently making frequent additions; click here to view it online now in our Digital Archive.