Clairtone
(Canada, 73 min.)
Dir/Prod. Ron Mann
Who can forget the time capsule contained in the episode “Signal 30” of Mad Men when accounts man Pete Campbell showed off his swanky stereo to colleague Ken Cosgrove. The ad men admire the gigantic wooden chest that runs seven feet along Pete’s living room while Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony blasts from the speakers.
“Incredible, right?” Pete says, complimenting his own purchase. “You expect to open the doors and see a tiny orchestra in there.”
“That would be amazing,” replies Ken.
“And it’s a beautiful piece of furniture,” adds Pete.
Mad Men doesn’t reveal the make and model of Pete’s prized stereo, but one can only imagine the many similar conversations that happened around a Clairtone as it gave life to a party during the swinging Sixties. Clairtone, a funky blast from the past of a documentary from Ron Mann (Carmine Street Guitars), revisits the story of a Canadian-made product that enjoyed unusual headway in a market saturated with American junk. Mann’s Mad Men-y doc considers when record players were more than vehicles for playing a tune. They were, as Pete Campbell agrees, fine pieces of furniture. They were accents to any living room, bedroom, or man cave in which they appeared. Even Hugh Hefner had one by his bed in the Playboy Mansion, as Mann’s upbeat doc reveals from the archives.
The Clairtone story comes courtesy of Nina Munk, the daughter of company co-founder Peter Munk. It’s a playful choice, if an odd one, since Nina’s birth in 1967 means that she came into this world around the same time that her dad was fired from Clairtone. Nina’s presence at first feels destabilizing, as it seems as if Mann centres the film on a single interviewee. However, the film recovers rather quickly when it becomes apparent that Nina reads from a script. Although she’s a journalist with her own published accounts of the family business, she’s ultimately a surrogate storyteller here, albeit an expert one. Alternatively, she’s the talking head counterpart to Mairéad Filgate as a go-go dancer bopping around the Clairtone stereos in the film’s stylish interludes.
That proximity to the subject and retrospective perspective inevitably filters the Clairtone story through rose-coloured glasses, though, as published accounts in The Globe and Mail and Maclean’s run somewhat counter to the framing here. Peter Munk himself accepts responsibility for the company’s failure in the Globe interview, while an offhand comment about insider trading doesn’t make the cut in the documentary. However, one business principle that Munk shares in the Maclean’s story could easily be the tag line for the film: “If you want to dream big, expect big problems.”
Big dreams and big problems seem as quintessentially Canadian a pairing as two creams and two sugars in a cup of coffee. However, as Munk tells how her father escaped Hungary at the onset of World War II and made a variation on the American dream in Toronto, Clairtone illuminates one remarkable family story as an unlikely success in a country that still struggles to find its footing with cultural exports.
The film recaps how Munk joined forces with friend David Gilmour, who inadvertently plays second fiddle in this telling, to create the high-end stereo company in 1958. Clairtone’s modest enterprise gave Canadian-made products prime floor space on department store floors. And, soon enough, consumers like Pete Campbell were taken by the stylish piece of furniture that hold a room together with its wood finishing, modern design, and extraordinary sound. Munk tells how the Clairtone stereos sold like hot cakes, but her father and Gilmour could barely keep up with the demand.
The delicate tango of supply and demand offers an undercurrent in the documentary. The story tells how Clairtone stereos became a hot commodity with Frank Sinatra sharing that he used one to listen to his own music with Oscar Peterson and the Beatles doing the same. But Munk’s narration explains how, even when high-end New York City department stores put Clairtones in display windows, the company lacked resources to meet the demand—or to manage the cash flow to sustainably expand operations. A few anecdotes illuminate strokes of good luck that worked in the company’s favour, but that’s ominous foreshadowing in this rapid rise-and-fall story.
The second act of Clairtone lays the blame on the government of Nova Scotia for the company’s collapse. The film explains how Munk and Gilmour moved operations to the Maritimes when incentives to expand the province’s industrial capacity and generate jobs proved too sweet a deal to refuse for a company with eyes on expansion. But varying logistical bellyflops, cultural tides, and gambles on Japanese cars and colour TVs meant that Munk and Gilmour were ousted from the company almost as soon as they moved operations to the boonies. If only they’d known the moon landing was coming!
Even if the stereo empire story is short and bittersweet, Clairtone explores how the little Canadian company grew and captured a pulse for a brief moment. The film shares the flash of genius from marketing genius Dalton Camp, who conceived of Clairtone’s ad campaigns that emphasized the Canadian makers and extolled the product’s virtues with a few simple lines of clean text beneath a chunk of negative space—a white void that would be filled with music, Camp might say. Mann smartly takes a cue from Camp’s aesthetic choices and positions Munk, Filgate, and a few pieces of handsome Clairtone furniture before clean white backdrops. It’s a lo-fi approach for a hi-fi tale.
The film has a fine eye for design that makes it a worthy companion to docs like Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica and Greg Durrell’s Design Canada. The latter doc, while more obscure, perhaps makes the better conversation piece with Mann’s film as it examines the world of graphic design in the land of the maple leaf during the Mad Men era. The Clairtone downfall speaks to a moment when aspiring Canuck capitalists were doing more with less than their American counterparts. Or at least trying to.
Nowadays, people can fit their music-players in their pockets, but the sound of the Clairtone era remains a romantic zenith. This film transports audiences back to a time when speakers were big and people could actually have a home big enough to house them.
