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Clint Eastwood Pays Homage to His Mentors.
This is just about my favorite Clint Eastwood image. From the 1973 neo-Western High Plains Drifter, this scene gets only a passing shot in the film, but it was preserved for prosperity in this lobby card (Lobby Card #8, to be specific). Here's Clint - as the The Stranger - in the graveyard with tombstones of Don Siegel and Sergio Leone - the two directors who put him on the map to stardom. A nice tribute.

This poster for the 1947 film Dear Ruth arrived in a collection last week. The unusual alignment of the two main stars' names has given rise to an urban legend, that this was the inspiration for the name of the character Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, one of the best known works of literature of the 20th Century. This is the first time William Holden and Joan Caulfield appeared together in a film, and this odd juxtaposition of their credits only happened once. It's easy to imagine Salinger strolling down Broadway and spotting this poster displayed under a movie theater marquee. Problem is, this film was not released until the summer of 1947, and Holden Caulfield made his first appearance in a Salinger short story in 1945. It's a great story; it's just not true.

This just in... from a former employee of United Artists, a set of three pristine rolled British quads for You Only Live Twice, featuring artwork by Frank McCarthy and Robert McGinnis.

After our seemingly endless winter here in the Northeast this year, this was a welcome new acquisition, a complete set of four lobby cards for Bruce Brown's classic The Endless Summer. Not much too look at, but a very scarce set; single lobby cards rarely turn up, much less an intact set. Two of the cards have light moisture damage along the edges, but somehow that just seems appropriate for this wave-splashed title.

I've counted no less than ten different styles of U.S. posters for Cassavetes' The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. This one is quite unusual and especially hard to find. A Chinese friend tells me that the characters on the left literally translate to Murder of an Underground Boss, which makes sense because the killing in the film is a murder, and bookmaking is an underground activity.



Here's another style poster for Chinese Bookie. This particular one features the lovely and talented Azizi Johari, who also had a brief cameo in Kubrick's The Shining, in a poster seen on the wall of Scatman Crothers' apartment.



A screen shot from The Shining, and the poster in detail: