Black Magic: Taxi

Chocolates and wealth, chocolates and taste, chocolates and elegance, chocolates and romance: the lifestyle of chocolates.

Fresh from directing the gritty working class realism of This Sporting Life, Lindsay Anderson here turns his poetic eye to portray the tastes of the very wealthy. A tall dark handsome man brings a box of Black Magic, in somewhat restrained fashion, to a beautiful woman as they ascend the stairs in the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

This is one of a large collection of films made by Rowntree’s of York (now Nestlé), most of which are adverts for their confectionary products. Black Magic was launched in 1933 as a less costly rival to Cadbury’s King George Assortment, the best-selling box of the day. It was described as ‘the first chocolate assortment ever to be made to order to a mass market’ on the basis of interviews with 2,500 shopkeepers and 7,000 consumers. Although associated at the time with social realism, Anderson’s upbringing would have made him familiar with the privileged world of this advert. Rather ironically, given this advert, Lindsay Anderson gave the name of Rowntree to the sadistic head whip in his seminal film of 1968, If.