A Guide to Goodness

Tasteful promo for the tasty black stuff.

This classy promo for the eponymous black stuff goes down easy and nicely hits the spot. Director Eric Marquis, a talented maverick of industrial filmmaking, expertly follows the age-old recipe of the ‘industrial process’ documentary but shuffles the sequencing; moving to and fro between Guinness’ production processes, laboratory research and contented consumers - and the firm’s all-important marketing and brand management activities of which the film itself is part.

Headed by Marquis (acting as producer rather than director) more-or-less the same production team took more-or-less the same brief four years later to brew a much more experimental, impressionistic film out of the same subject matter: Guinness for You (1971) (available on BFI DVD Roll Out the Barrel). This take is a more conventional but still elegant blend of advertising with sponsored documentary: hop-sharp, malt-sweet and reliably tasteful.