Cinema-Illustrazione, Part 2

The popular Italian magazine Cinema-Illustrazione, founded in 1930, published a great series of postcards with female Hollywood film stars during the early 1930s. Last Thursday, EFSP did a post with glamorous postcards of the first Cinema-Illustrazione series. Today we continue with a second post with more cards from the first series plus some of the second series.


Italian postcard by Cinema-Illustrazione, Milano, series 1, no. 16. Photo: Paramount.

American actress Clara Bow (1905-1965) rose to stardom in silent films during the 1920s. It was her appearance as a plucky shopgirl in the film It (Clarence G. Badger, 1927) that brought her global fame and the nickname 'The It Girl'. Bow came to personify the Roaring Twenties and is described as its leading sex symbol.


Italian postcard by Cinema-Illustrazione, series 1, no. 19. Photo: Fox Film.

Red-headed and blue-green-eyed operatic singer Jeanette MacDonald (1903-1965) was discovered for the cinema by Ernst Lubitsch, who cast her opposite Maurice Chevalier in The Love Parade (1929). Later 'the Iron Butterfly' co-starred with Nelson Eddy in a string of successful musicals and played opposite Clark Gable in San Francisco (1936).


Italian postcard by Cinema-Illustrazione, series 1, no. 20. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

American actress Norma Shearer (1902-1983) was the 'First Lady of MGM'. She often played spunky, sexually liberated ingenues, and was the first person to be nominated five times for an Academy Award for acting. Shearer won the Best Actress Oscar for The Divorcee (1930).


Italian postcard by Cinema-Illustrazione, Milano, series 1, no. 26. Photo: Paramount.

Red-haired, cupid-bow-mouthed Nancy Carroll (1903-1965) became a very popular Hollywood star upon the advent of sound film because of her singing and dancing abilities. She was reported to have received more fan mail than any of her Hollywood peers of the same era. As she expanded her acting range from flaming flapper to ditzy comedienne to sensitive heroine, she was nominated for an Oscar for The Devil's Holiday (1930).


Italian postcard by Cinema-Illustrazione, Milano, series 1, no. 27. Photo: United Artists.

Betty Grable (1916-1973) was between 1931 and 1932 credited in American films as Frances Dean, and hence as Betty Grable. Grable was known as 'The Girl With the Million Dollar Legs'. During World War II, the quicksilver blonde's famous pin-up pose - in a bathing suit, back to the camera, smiling over her right shoulder - adorned barracks all around the world. Her 42 films during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s grossed more than $100 million. One of her biggest successes was the comedy How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), which was also one of her last films.


Italian postcard by Cinema-Illustrazione, Milano, series 1, no. 29. Photo: United Artists.

Mexican and American actress Dolores del Río (1905–1983) was a Hollywood star in the 1920s and 1930s, and one of the most important female actresses of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. Del Río was the first major Latin cross-over star in Hollywood and was considered one of the most beautiful faces that have emerged in Hollywood cinema. She also appeared in several European films.


Italian postcard by Cinema-Illustrazione, Milano, series 1, no. 30. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Beautiful Anita Page (1910–2008) was one of the most popular leading ladies of Hollywood during the last years of the silent screen and the first years of the sound era.


Italian postcard nu Cinema-Illustrazione, Milano, series 1, no. 31. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Lovely British actress Lilian Bond (1908-1991) made over 50 films in Hollywood from the late 1920s through the 1940s. One of her first roles was in James Whale’s classic horror-comedy The Old Dark House (1932), but in later years she mostly appeared in B-movies, both in leading parts and in bit roles. Possibly her best-known film role was in the Western The Westerner (1940) starring Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan, in which she played Lillie Langtry.


Italian postcard by Cinema-Illustrazione, Milano, series 1, no. 32. Photo: Fox Film.

Canadian-born Cecilia Parker (1914-1993) moved with her family to Hollywood when she was a child. She did extra work for about a year before she was noticed by Fox executives, who signed her to a contract in 1931. After several uncredited parts such as the maid in James Whale's Frankenstein (1931), her first major supporting role Parker had in the George O'Brien Western The Rainbow Trail (1932). Several Westerns and action movies with heroes such as O'Brien, Tom Tyler, Ken Maynard, Buck Jones, and others would follow. Her career went along steadily if not spectacularly, acting mostly at small film production companies, even if she had a supporting part in the MGM production The Painted Veil (1934), starring Greta Garbo. After this film, Parker mostly acted at the majors MGM and Paramount, but also at minor companies (where she often had leads instead of the supporting parts with the majors). In 1937 Parker had a breakthrough, when she was signed by MGM to play Marian Hardy, the older sister of Mickey Rooney in the "Andy Hardy" series, starting with A Family Affair (George B. Seitz, 1937). It's this part that people remember her for. She must have given MGM some trouble at one point because in 1941 she was "loaned" (exiled is probably a better word) to ultra-low-rent studio PRC for one picture. However, she made five more pictures at MGM before she retired in 1942. She returned in 1958 for one final Andy Hardy film but then went back to the real estate business she and her husband operated in Ventura, California, where she died in 1993.


Italian postcard by Cinema-Illustrazione, Milano, series 1, no. 36. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Lupe Velez (1908-1944), was one of the first Mexican actresses to succeed in Hollywood. Her nicknames were 'The Mexican Spitfire' and 'Hot Pepper'. She was the leading lady in such silent films as The Gaucho (1927), Lady of the Pavements (1928), and Wolf Song (1929). During the 1930s, her well-known explosive screen persona was exploited in a series of successful films like Hot Pepper (1933), Strictly Dynamite (1934), and Hollywood Party (1934). In the 1940s, Vélez's popularity peaked after appearing in the Mexican Spitfire films. In 1944, Vélez died of an intentional overdose of the barbiturate drug Seconal.


Italian postcard by Cinema-Illustrazione, Milano, series 1, no. 37. Photo: Fox Film.

Marguerite Churchill (1910-2000) was an American film actress with a film career spanning from 1929 to 1952. She is best known today as John Wayne's first leading lady, in The Big Trail (1930).


Italian postcard by Cinema-Illustrazione, Milano, series 1, no. 38. Photo: Paramount.

Red-haired, cupid-bow-mouthed Nancy Carroll (1903-1965) became a very popular Hollywood star upon the advent of sound film because of her singing and dancing abilities. She was reported to have received more fan mail than any of her Hollywood peers of the same era. As she expanded her acting range from flaming flapper to ditzy comedienne to sensitive heroine, she was nominated for an Oscar for The Devil's Holiday (1930).


Italian postcard by Cinema-Illustrazione, Milano, series 1, no. 39. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Joan Marsh (1913-2000) was a brassy, blue-eyed platinum blonde of the 1930s in the Jean Harlow tradition. As a child, she appeared between 1915 and 1921 in silent films starring Mary Pickford on which her father worked as a cameraman. Later, during the sound era, she resumed her acting career and performed in a variety of films during the 1930s and 1940s.


Italian postcard by Cinema-Illustrazione, Milano, series 1, no. 40. Photo: Paramount.

Jeanne Helbling was an actress of the French cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, who was extremely active in early French sound film. She was also a Resistance heroine.

To be continued next week, Thursday 15 April.

For the editions of the magazine Cinema-Illustrazione between 1930 and 1939, see the website of the Centro Sperimentale.