In honor of Black History Month we celebrate the ”What Becomes A Legend Most” icon, Lena Horne. When Lena Horne was asked to become the image for Blackglama’s 1969 ad campaign poster (see above), she follows in the heels of such female icons as Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford; she was the first African American celebrity to do so. For more information see:https://www.walterfilm.com/shop/posters/lena-horne-blackglama-poster/
The Netflex film Passing deals with the African American topic that has come to be known as “Passing” when a person classified as a member of a racial group is accepted or perceived (“passes”) as a member of another. Historically, the term has been used primarily in the United States to describe a person of color or of multiracial ancestry who assimilated into the white majority to escape the legal and social conventions of racial segregation and discrimination.”
These three films,Imitation of Life (1934), Pinky (1949) and Passing (2021) each deal with a Black woman, who, because of her light skin, passes for white and the ramifications that occur when that reality becomes a significant factor in her life.
WalterFilm.com’s fourth catalog (#45/2020) contains 96 pages that include vintage original photographs, posters, programs, pressbooks, lobby cards and film scripts. The categories encompassed are: Featured, Film Noir, Directors, Poster Art, LGBTQ, Comedy, Women, Literature and African Americana.
The catalog’s cover (above) is the original poster from the play PORGY by Dorothy and Dubois Heyward, which became the source for the opera PORGY AND BESS with book by Dubois Heyward and music and lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin.
Vintage African Americana (vintage original star photographs, posters, lobby cards, film scripts, newspaper articles, rare books and advertising or marketing collectibles) identified with all types of black celebrities is highly valued, as exampled by Walter Film’s own offerings that includes the following:
PINKY – a group of 14 8 x 10″ photographs from the 1949, Twentieth Century Fox Film starring Jeanne Crain with an Oscar nominated performance by Ethel Waters, directed by Elia Kazan;
Hollywood Portrait Photography came into existence at the beginning of the 20th Century, following the relocation of the film industry from the east coast to Hollywood. These fledgling studios needed to create interest in their motion pictures by promoting the actors who stared in them. From 1910 – 1970, there were six individuals that became the photographers of choice for “shooting the stars,” and each, in their own way (as seen above in George Edward Hurrell’s stunning portrait of Marlene Dietrich), helped define the look of the Golden Age of Motion Pictures and the Hollywood star: Albert Witzel, George Hurrell, Clarence Bull, Ruth Harriet Louise, Milton Greene and Cecil Beaton.
As the New York Times reported on September 6, 1936,
The cinema’s glamour machine that takes waitresses, debutantes, actresses, school-girls and their masculine parallels and by adroit veneering makes of them the dream children of the silver screen… Its product thunders from newspaper and magazine pages, from billboards and theatre lobbies. Its prime purpose is to make the customer go to the ticket window and lay down money. It must give the appearance of genius to very ordinary people. It must conceal physical defects and give the illusion of beauty and personality should none exist. It must restore youth where age has made its rounds. It must give warmth to neutral or rigid features. It is in short, the still department.
As an addition to our WalterFilm.com website, we are delighted to announce that Walter Reuben Inc. has expanded its marketing profile to include a portfolio of catalogs that will consist of exceptional items, as exampled above. This first catalog in this series (#42/2018) is 126 pages and encompasses the breadth and depth of our collecting and connoisseurship.
Its cover is graced by a stunning photograph of Audrey Hepburn in the “little black dress” designed by Hubert de Givenchy and worn by her in the opening scene of the 1961 romantic comedy Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Here are two additional photographs of that scene from our collection.
