Category: Featured Item

Featured Item (01/05/2020)

Today’s featured item comes with a twist of mystery!

Taken from our collection of 35mm film cuttings, today’s item is three black-and-white still frames, seemingly of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. This suggests that it is possibly from one of the first five Road To… series of films: Road to Singapore (1940), Road to Zanzibar (1941), Road to Morocco (1942), Road to Utopia (1946), or, Road to Rio (1947). The final two films of the series – Road to Bali (1952) and The Road to Hong Kong (1962) – were released in colour.

The series typically featured the all-star cast of Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, and Dorothy Lamour, though Lamour’s role was reduced to a cameo in the final film with the younger Joan Collins instead taking the female lead role. Though often remembered for mixing adventure with musical numbers and comedy, each film satirised common genre tropes and themes of the time. Yet, some readers may now better recognise tropes and themes of the Road To… series itself through a number of episodes of the American animated television series Family Guy (Fox, 1999 – ). Eight episodes have now featured a ‘Road To…’ prefix, and feature the characters embarking on a series of absurd adventures, including moments of song and dance, satirising and paying homage to the original series.

It is worth noting that Crosby and Hope shared two other starring credits, for Star Spangled Rhythm (1942) and Variety Girl (1947), both of which are also black-and-white musicals. Could this still be from either of these films?

So, do you know which film this still is from? If so, let us know via Twitter @cinema_memory!

 

Featured Item (24/04/2020)

This week’s featured item is a little bit different to previous weeks – it’s an original Picturegoer Magazine Postcard Club membership card, which entitled the holder to ‘all the privileges of the “Picturegoer” Postcard Club’.  The most prominent of these ‘privileges’ was allowing the holder to purchase a frequent supply of black and white or hand-coloured postcards of one’s favourite Hollywood stars – including Rin Tin Tin!

All of our postcards were donated by the original owner of this membership card, Mr. Denis Houlston. Denis wrote about discovering and joining the Postcard Club in a 1995 letter (sent to the Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain [CCINTB] research project):

‘I think when I was 9 or 10 and in bed ill a family friend unwittingly gave my mother a large pile of “PICTUREGOER”S to interest me. I was hooked and on return to fanatically-football health bought it every week. I joined the ‘Picturegoer’ Picture club and amassed a collection of glossy sepia postcards 6”x4” of my idols.’

The CCINTB project interviewed Denis in April 1995, where he explained that though there was no date on the membership card, he believes it would have been in either 1931 or 1932 that he received it. He also explained a bit more about the process or ordering the postcards and how he amassed such fantastic collection:

‘…for threepence each you could get a sepia photograph of your favourite star, so there’s a list, you sent off for them. But if you ordered twelve you could get them for 2 and 6, which is what, 12 and a half pence now, each. So I totalled that, twelve and a half for twelve! A penny each instead of threepence. So I had a collection oh, I collected these avidly.’

Thanks to Denis, we now have a collection of some 199 Picturegoer postcards, featuring a wide range of actors, actresses and, as mentioned earlier, even a dog! What was once a childhood pastime for Denis has become a valuable resource for historians from a wide range of disciplines.

Denis remained interested in film and cinemagoing throughout his life. Writing in a 2002 letter to Annette Kuhn (by which time he was in his late 80s) he stated that he had become involved with the North-West Film Archive to explore how cinemas could better serve hard of hearing audiences, some seventy years on from his joining the Picturegoer Postcard Club

(Note, the address details have been smudged here for redaction purposes, the original copy is un-edited)