Friday, October 3, 2008

1951 English Front of House Cards

English movie items for Alice have always held a certain fascination with me, probably because the film premiered in London, making the English items sort of 'first release', at least in my mind. The movie paper from England is especially hard to find. This is a complete (?) set of eight front of house cards, the English equivalent of lobby cards, from the original RKO release in 1951.

Front of house cards are slightly smaller than their American counterparts, they are 8 x 10 inches, the size of a standard American publicity still. The images on these English cards are also completely different from the American lobby cards, for one thing the colors are correct to the film whereas the RKO lobby cards are notorious for their bizarre colors.

The images for the FOH cards are taken directly from publicity stills, in fact you can actually see the negative numbers in some of the cards.

Normally I would spread these out over several days, but I don't really have any clever commentary on most of the images, so you get them all at once.

This is one of the cards where the negative number is quite visible in the lower right corner of the image, A-224.

I made the distinction in the title as 1951 FOH cards, because there are sets of cards from both the 1969 re-release and another later re-release, possibly 1970s or 1980s, I'm not sure which. And yes, there really was a 1969 re-release in the UK, a full 5 years prior to the first re-release in the US.



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