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The Lawton Story, the 1949 William Beaudine & Harold Daniels religious life-of-Christ melodrama ("There are people in hell... whom this story could have saved!"; "Unexcelled! [sic] Unequaled!"; "Soap washes off dirt. But Uncle Mark says - 'Only God can wash away your sins!'"; "Cast of more than 3000 - Entirely in Cinecolor"; "4 big song hits") starring Ginger Prince (billed as "Introducing and starring Ginger Prince, 42 inches and 42 lbs. of southern charm"), Forrest Taylor, Millard Coody (as himself/Jesus Christ), Gwyn Shipman, Darlene Bridges, Ferris Taylor, Maude Eburne, Lasses White, Del Fisher, Hazel Lee Becker, Willa Pearl Curtis, Beelzebub, Lee Lindsay (billed as "In person on our stage - The Wichita Mountain Speaker"), and The Pageant Girls. Note that this is a VERY odd movie! It was made in 1949 by legendary showman Kroger Babb, who specialized in taking low budget movies and showing them around the country in roadshow releases, often with very misleading advertising. It is a re-telling of "The Passion Play" (the life of Jesus), but with a framing device involving a young girl who has a greedy grandfather who is a banker, and she takes him to see the local production of The Passion Play, and the viewers watch the entire play, and by the end of it, the grandfather is so moved that he vows to help people instead of profiting off of them. All the actors in the movie were from rural Lawton, Oklahoma, and they had such strong accents that everybody had to be dubbed (one reviewer said that it was the only movie ever where it was dubbed from English into English)! The producers of the movie did not focus their advertising on the life of Jesus aspect of the movie, but rather on the young girl, and they had very odd advertising (to say the least) showing the girl naked in a bathtub "washing away her sins", and a grandmotherly type woman saying "There are people in Hell... whom this story could have saved!" We don't know how well the movie did at the box office in 1949, but we suspect not well at all, because movie advertising from it is beyond rare (we have only ever auctioned a single poster from that first release, and nothing else). Reviewers at the time said the movie was amateurish and one mentioned the telephone poles that you can see behind Christ's crucifix! In 1950, no doubt because of the terrible reviews the movie had received, Kroger Babb then re-released it across the country as "The Prince of Peace", focusing on the Passion Play aspect of the movie in his advertising (and of course, he hoped no one would remember its earlier release as "The Lawton Story")! He advertised it with these taglines: "The Most Complete Life Story of Christ Ever Filmed in Color!"; "The screen's First Great Passion Play. The world's finest spiritual screen production"; "Already praised by millions"; "The beautiful story of Jesus."; "It's all in natural color"; "The greatest story ever told"; "The life of Jesus Christ"; "The screen's great new $2,500,000 version of The Passion Play". If the original framing device was left in, then we suspect that viewers of this second Kroger Babb release (as "The Prince of Peace") were very confused by what they were watching! A knowledgeable collector tells us that the movie was still complete in 1959 but only the Passion Play section was featured in the 1990 VHS release.
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Important Added Info: Note that this Canadian lobby card has a black and white 6 1/2" x 8" still glued ("tipped in") at upper right. Also note that we have a scan of both the front and the back of this lobby card, which should greatly help you see what defects it has.

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