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  Vintage film star photos from my art openingMay 12, 2012 7:07 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:The group art show opening tonight was a whole lot of fun! And one of my two pieces even got bought on the spot--okay so it was a very generous friend of my mother, but hey. :D Also they had some really nice refreshments AND they gave me a free cup of their delicious hot chocolate. And there was hob-nobbing and art materials talking (one guy used to run an art supply store!) with the other artists, not to mention getting to hang out with the shop owners and their visitors. Oh and they had a constant custom soundtrack spinning from a multitude of old vinyl albums, like oh say, this one from this. Ha! We are talking some good times!
 
I also scored some stuff I can actually share with you! The theme of the group show was "portraits," and among the exhibits were piles and piles of old film studio publicity shots--mostly from the early '50's, but some going back into the '30's (and a few from the '70s but the less said about those the better ;P). After I'd almost poured through all of them, one of the owners mentioned they were for sale (and placed the price tag among them :P -- $5 a piece or I think it was $20 for six), so of course I had to root back through them to dig out my favorites to claim as my own--and now I'm scanning them and showing them to you!
 
The first one that really struck me was this one, because it was one of the few in which I actually recognized the person:
 
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Yes it's Nova Pilbeam! I've seen her an early Alfred Hitchcock movie--back when he was still in England, you know: the 1937 film Young and Innocent. She did a bang-up job in a starring role in that, and although I'm pretty terrible with names I think I remembered hers because it's so unusual. Heck it's almost super-sci-fi at that: just change it to oh Nova Drillbeam for instance and away you go.
 
What I found especially amusing was what someone--at some time--had written on the back:
 
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Well *I* think it's a super name, and she's a good actress. She was just 17 at the time Young and Innocent was made, and I realize now I'd seen her--but hadn't known anything about her, or realized it was her later--a bit earlier, as she has a smaller role in Hitchcock's 1934 film The Man Who Knew Too Much. Mrs. Pilbeam, who is still with us at the sterling age of 92, left acting in 1949, before she'd even reached 30, so her body of work is pretty brief! And the only clue as to what year this photo might have been taken was that it was from "GB Pictures," which a little searching turned up must have been the British studio Gainsborough Pictures (closed in 1951).
 
... Okay so the other clue was the actual "NOV 29 1936" stamped on the back, but I'd forgotten about that. >_> So I compared the list of Mrs. Pilbeam's movies with the movies produced by Gainsborough, and the only overlap was the 1936 film Tudor Rose (called Nine Days a Queen when it came to the States, since obviously we can't be expected to know what a "tudor" is :P), in which she played Lady Jane Grey. That publicity shot isn't exactly period clothing, so I guess it was just a general shot around that time for their "Junior Star" lineup or something.
 
As a bit of a personal aside, Gainsborough was widely known in England--apparently--for their "series of morally ambivalent costume melodramas" that ran from 1942 to '46 (including 1945's flamboyantly ambivalent The Wicked Lady, which Queen Mary surprised everyone in thoroughly enjoying despite the scandalously low necklines of its period dresses, which were hugely censored in the US release and I guess maybe that still accounts for it being pretty impossible to find in a modern region 1 release ;_;) largely sharing a concentrated cast of stars, one of whom was the marvelously wicked lady Margaret Lockwood who, as it happens, beat out Nova Pilbeam for the leading role in Hitchcock's (and Gainsborough's) 1938 The Lady Vanishes, which very well could be my favorite movie of all time. Would it have been as good or even gooder if Mrs. Pilbeam had been the star? It's hard to imagine but I'll try!
 
~~EDIT 2: The Lady Vanishes is claimed by archive.org to be in the public domain, and you can watch it there. I wonder if this means the other Gainsborough Pictures films are public domain as well... Tudor Rose/Nine Days a Queen and The Wicked Lady have been released on VHS, and Region 2 DVD in the latter's case, but all by different companies--so maybe they *are*! But they aren't on archive.org at any rate, alas.~~
 
~~EDIT 3: Ah, although a Federal Register Notice of 1997 ordered US copyrights restored on The Lady Vanishes and Tudor Rose based on an overseas copyright claim by Carlton Film Distributors, Ltd (producers of The Wicked Lady region 2 DVD). So technically it probably shouldn't still be on archive.org. =p And I wonder if this means Carlton also has the rights to Gainsborough production photos from the time? Well if you are from Carlton lemme see the paperwork and I can take the photos down. :D~~
 
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The other photo that really struck me was much more mysterious because I had no idea who it was, but it sure was a nice photo:
 
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The only clue (really) this time aside from the image itself was the small print copyright notice at the bottom (and yeah it is partially out of focus in the print, oddly): "Copyright © 1957, Loew's Incorporated. Permission granted for Newspaper and Magazine reproduction. Made in U.S.A."
 
Well I guess I might be in trouble with Loew's Incorporated since I'm not quite a Newspaper or Magazine--except that Loew's Incorporated hasn't existed since I think 1959, when the 1948 Supreme Court Ruling in the film-studio-system-busting United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. case finally resulted in splitting it from its film production arm, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ("MGM"), which Marcus Loew had formed in 1924 by merging Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Productions with his line of theaters, Loew's Theatres Incorporated. The remaining Loew's Corporation was otherwise just a holding corporation for various non-film business activities when Tri-Star Pictures (jointly Coca-Cola, CBS, and Time) "acquired" their theater chain in 1985. In '88, Tri-Star (now just Coca-Cola) merged with Columbia Pictures (which Coca-Cola had let go the previous year) to form Columbia Pictures Entertainment. Sony bought Columbia from Coca-Cola in '89 and merged it with Cineplex Odeon Corporation in 1998, resulting in Loews Cineplex Entertainment...which declared bankruptcy in 2001 due to Cineplex's inherited financial problems. It was bought by several corporations in 2002, who then sold it to "investors" in 2004...who succeeded in merging it into AMC Theatres in 2005. So AMC Theatres, if you need me to take this image down, let me know.
 
~~EDIT: Oh wait! I was probably looking at the wrong side of that--maybe it would be the MGM side that has the rights. Their lineage up 'til now is *slightly* less convoluted--in the hands of various moguls in the late '60's, acquired United Artists in 1981, owned by Ted Turner for 74 days in 1986 (he had financial troubles :p)--oh! Except he held onto their film and television library. Okay, so Ted Turner, let me know if you need me to take the photo down. :)~~
 
MGM released 32 movies in 1957 (can you imagine???), and perusing the 26 about which Wikipedia has information and then looking up their female stars, the best likeness seemed to be in the April 3rd, Dean Martin (<3) vehicle (his first movie after breaking with Jerry Lewis, as a matter of fact) Ten Thousand Bedrooms: Anna Maria Alberghetti. I wasn't sure it was her at first but these production photos of her with Dino seemed pretty close--except the dress wasn't the same. But then I spotted her coming out of the cathedral at the end of the movie in the dress from my photo so yep, it's definitely Italian actress Anna Maria Alberghetti, still active at age 75. :)
 
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One other interesting thing about these old publicity photos was that "exploitation" seemed to have a different meaning back then; some of them had labels with wording along the lines of "FOR EXPLOITATION ONLY."
 
Oh yeah, and they would also touch up the photos with white or black ink to make highlights, shadows, or profiles pop a little more, or to adjust the cropping, for when the photo would be reproduced in shrunk-down form in newspaper articles--the actual original ink touch-ups were on a few of them!
 
 
 
 
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