DALLAS, TX.- The Son of Frankenstein returns to Heritage Auctions for the first time in eight years.
The Style A one sheet for the 1939 Universal Studios masterpiece is a terrifyingly scarce poster, even though it’s considered, by far, the best of the two posters made for director Rowland V. Lee’s trip to the castle in the Bavarian Alps. During Heritage’s long and storied tenure offering some of the world’s most coveted cinematic treasures, the auction house has offered just a single Son of Frankenstein Style A one sheet — in July 2016. At long last, another one reappears in Heritage’s December 2-3 Movie Posters Signature® Auction alongside other precious rarities. It’s a blockbuster discovery advertising a milestone film in which then-51-year-old Boris Karloff made his final appearance as Victor Frankenstein’s monster.
The Son doesn’t rise alone. This auction also features two more breathtaking rarities from 1935’s The Bride of Frankenstein: a window card Heritage has only offered once before,and the coveted title lobby card the catalog hails as “one of the great horror promotional items ever produced.”
There’s also a story here worthy of its own big-screen retelling, as this event features impossible-to-find Invisible Man and Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup lobby cards discovered inside the walls of a Canadian home during a renovation. Who knows what treasures lurk behind the drywall, especially in Freedonia?
Here, too, is the only known poster tied to Orson Welles’ legendary staging of Macbeth under the auspices of the Federal Theater Project in 1936 — “The Play That Electrified Harlem,” as the Library of Congress calls it. This invaluable memento associated with the maker of Citizen Kane joins some of the most stunning posters in cinema history.
“This auction is a cinephile’s dream and a collector’s paradise, filled with posters that tell the story of cinema itself,” says Zach Pogemiller, Heritage’s Associate Director of Movie Posters. “From the iconic horror of Son of Frankenstein to Disney’s early animation marvels, each piece is a rare and precious window into film history. It’s a joy to bring these works to market, where new caretakers will appreciate not only their artistry but the stories and legacies they carry.”
Cinema students and film fans will surely delight at the remarkable finds from the Property from a Distinguished Collection, including one of the few known surviving posters for 1925’s Alice in the Jungle — one of the so-called “Alice Comedies” created by Walt Disney while he was still at the Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City, whose eventual bankruptcy drove Disney to Hollywood. The Alice shorts were radical works at the time: Disney and such collaborators as Ub Iwerks and Friz Freleng blended live action with animation, pairing actress Virginia Davis as Alice with a cartoon cat named Julius and other assorted animated animals, a sort of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? for a post-World War I audience that had never seen or dared dream of such a thing. There were 57 films in the series, with Alice in the Jungle Davis’ final entry in the title role.
Heritage hasn’t offered a poster for this film in 22 years, and it’s joined by other Disney delights, including a first-ever offering of 1932’s Santa’s Workshop, the 33rd entry in the “Silly Symphonies”; 1933’s Mickey’s Pal Pluto, which hasn’t stepped up to the auction block in almost two decades; and a stunning poster for 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with artwork by Gustaf Tenggren, the only known copy of this striking masterwork!
From the same collection hails yet another poster Heritage has seen only once before: this British advertisement for 1945’s horror anthology Dead of Night boasting artwork by Leslie Hurry, best known as a set designer for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, the Old Vic, the Royal Opera House and the Royal Shakespeare Company. The supernatural anthology was produced by Ealing Studios, best known for its post-war comedies Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers. But Dead of Night was terrifying enough to come in at No. 5 on Martin Scorsese’s list of the 11 Scariest Horror Movies of All Time.
From that home renovation in Canada come two lobby cards Heritage has never before offered, both from 1933’s The Invisible Man: this one featuring Claude Rains shrouded in bandages and another featuring Henry Travers, Gloria Stuart and William Harrigan. They are joined by three lobby cards from arguably the greatest (and most relevant) comedy ever made: 1933’s Duck Soup, directed by the legendary Leo McCarey and the final film to star all four Marx Brothers before Groucho, Chico and Harpo took their act to MGM. This auction actually has more Marx Brothers posters than you can shake a stick at if that’s your idea of a good time, including two from their official farewell, A Night in Casablanca.
Speaking of, sort of: This event includes what Pogemiller calls “one of this film’s best posters,” the insert for 1942’s Casablanca, which prominently features Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and the other key cast members of this wartime masterpiece. Between the Casablanca poster and this Style A one sheet for Citizen Kane, it’s fair to see two of the best films ever made are beautifully represented in this auction.
But for Welles completists, this theater window card for The Greek Theatre’s production of Macbethis a revelation. Pogemiller says it’s easily among his favorite pieces in the auction, as it’s the only known survivor for Welles’ adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play starring an all-Black cast set in 19th century Haiti.
As the Library of Congress recounts, this Macbeth – which came to be known as “Voodoo Macbeth” — was among four Manhattan premieres in the spring of 1936 that “solidified the shaky reputation of the Federal Theater Project, the most controversial of the Works Progress Administration’s arts programs.” It’s notable for myriad reasons, not the least of which was that it launched Welles’ directorial debut before he’d even turned 21. As the LOC notes, the adaptation “gave African-American performers, usually restricted to dancing and singing for white audiences, a chance to prove they were capable of tackling the classics.”
Welles’ adaptation of Macbeth opened in New York on April 14, 1936, at Manhattan’s Lafayette Theatre, which was so crowded the show began more than an hour after its scheduled start because the audience couldn’t reach its seats. As Welles would later recount, “By all odds my great success in my life was that play because the opening night there were five blocks in which all traffic was stopped. You couldn’t get near the theater in Harlem. Everybody who was anybody in the black or white world was there. And when the play ended there were so many curtain calls that finally they left the curtain open, and the audience came up on the stage to congratulate the actors. And that was, that was magical.”
It sold out its initial 10-week run, then spread nationally throughout late summer and early fall of 1936, with stops in such cities as Dallas, Indianapolis, Chicago and Detroit. Los Angeles’ Federal Theater Negro Players staged their own version at the Mayan Theatre that summer, moving the setting once more to Africa; hence, the poster’s explanation that it was “based on the New York City production of Orson Welles.” This Greek poster is especially significant because, as the Library of Congress notes, that staging was intended to be “a one-time, visiting performance from the Mayan Theatre production.” One might even be inclined to say this Macbeth placard is the Rosebud of this auction.
