LGM Film Club, Part 38: The Bottle and the Throttle
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Today’s film is The Bottle and the Throttle, an anti-drunk driving film from 1965. It combines the ridiculous production values of your typical PSA film from the period with a message that remains plenty serious today.
What’s fascinating about watching this is remembering back when killing people while drunk driving was a gentlemen’s crime with few real consequences. It’s framed that way too. Maybe our driver will go to prison for vehicular homicide or maybe he won’t, but the film itself says he won’t get convicted for drunk driving because he was only buzzed and passed the tests. It feels like we’ve made solid progress on this issue in the last half-century, but obviously anyone who thinks it’s acceptable to drive drunk is committing what should be a serious crime. And that’s still plenty common, especially on the rather sizable buzzed boundaries.