The New World of Stainless Steel (1960)
In 2025, Chicago Film Archives received funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Basic Preservation grant program to photochemically preserve The New World of Stainless Steel (1960), a Technicolor industrial film made at Chicago’s Wilding Pictures Productions for Republic Steel. This project was completed in partnership with the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware.
Wilding Pictures & The New World of Stainless Steel
From 1937 to 1966 Wilding Pictures Productions, located on Chicago’s north side, was one of the largest producers of industrial films in the country. It generously supported a film industry that was nonstop and flourishing as it provided significant income for the city’s filmmakers. Many nationwide companies headquartered in the Midwest such as McDonalds Corporation, Abbott Laboratories, and United Airlines produced films to train staff or to illustrate company processes in manufacturing and services. Films like these were commissioned for annual corporate meetings or to enhance and embed a company’s brand within their corporate communities.
The New World of Stainless Steel (1960) was made by Wilding for their client, Republic Steel. It was produced in 35mm Technicolor using high-end, sophisticated cinematography and effects. It premiered in Republic’s home base of Canton, Ohio on June 28, 1961, screening at the Palace Theater as a short subject preceding the premiere of Hollywood feature The Parent Trap. Before the screening, corporate leaders from Republic Steel attended a civic dinner that climaxed a week-long celebration of the steel industry centered in Canton. Among the many distinguished guests representing business, education, and local government were motion picture executives from New York and Chicago’s Wilding Pictures Productions. Following the meal, a motorcade of automobiles decked out in stainless steel detail transported the dinner guests to the theater.
The New World of Stainless Steel is a jaunty, jazzy, and somewhat surreal depiction of one of Republic Steel’s newest products and the endless opportunities it offered for real-world applications. The film has the unmistakable tone and distinctive visuals of midcentury modern animation, reminiscent of the artistry and design of Saul Bass or Mort Goldsholl.
The film’s narrator describes the production of stainless steel as a “young giant coming to life,” fulfilling “the promise of an enormous future.” Colossal cubes, cylinders, and bars of metal glow fierce and Technicolor-brilliant as they are forged, cast, and welded inside the belly of an unnamed steel factory. We see various models of stainless steel structures mounted on a rotating platform displaying its many textures. An architect, with notepad in hand, wanders among them considering the many ways this metal could be tailored to so many jobs. To underscore that point, a young girl, dressed in her Sunday best, ascends a stainless steel escalator wearing a stainless steel bonnet with her small arms wrapped around a bird cage and blender. Her mother follows close behind clutching a coffeemaker and cooking pan, with other kitchen gadgetry slung over her shoulder, while Dad brings up the rear with a fire extinguisher, bucket of tools and small wrenches attached to his fedora… everything of course made of stainless steel. What sets this industrial film apart is its whimsical and often silly ways that it delivers its earnest and confident messaging. Four fighter jets in formation rip through the skies as picture then cuts to a close-up of a nurse who quietly prepares a hypodermic needle to administer. Meanwhile the narrator claims stainless steel can “speed you up… or slow you down.”
The uncredited jazz score was composed by Academy Award nominee, Lloyd B. Norlin. During the 1950s, Norlin had a sound studio in Evanston, Illinois, where he regularly wrote musical scores for films made by Wilding. In 1960 an LP recording of the film’s musical score was released and given away at film screenings throughout the country.
About the preservation
One of CFA’s earliest discoveries, tucked away inside a rusty film can marked Iran, was a carefully wound and seemingly pristine Technicolor 16mm print titled The New World of Stainless Steel. It resided among the 5,000 films that made up the Chicago Public Library Collection, CFA’s inaugural film collection, donated to the archive when the library deaccessioned their circulating 16mm collection in 2003.
Research to date suggests that this acetate print and elements held in the Hagley Museum and Library’s Cinecraft Productions Collection are the only remaining extant materials related to The New World of Stainless Steel. Despite the prolificness of Wilding Pictures Productions, the films they produced are considered orphan works.
Using CFA’s print and 16mm color internegatives from the Hagley Museum and Library, we worked with FotoKem to create a digital intermediate and sound capture suitable for creating a digital master as well as for printing back to film. Simon Daniel Sound worked with FotoKem’s sound capture to create a new 35mm optical soundtrack internegative. FotoKem conformed and printed the results to 35mm polyester film, yielding a 35mm preservation picture negative, a 35mm optical sound negative, and new 35mm exhibition prints of this remarkable artifact of Midwestern film production and industry.
If you are a programmer or curator interested in showing The New World of Stainless Steel, please contact us.
Many thanks the National Film Preservation Foundation, the Hagley Museum & Library, Simon Daniel Sound, and FotoKem for their help in preserving this film for the future.