eMoviePoster.com

As many of you know, I, Bruce Hershenson, owner of eMoviePoster.com, have collected pressbooks (and related movie paper like studio yearbooks) for over 30 years, and I have the world's foremost collection of such material. I thought I would share one item with you this week, the type of items you almost surely have never seen before, and which might not come up for sale for DECADES!

This week, I have the pressbook from Jew Suss, (released in the U.S. as "Power"), the 1934 Lothar Mendes English anti-Semitism historical melodrama (set in 1730 in the Jewish ghetto of Wurtenburg, Germany; about a brilliant Jewish man who rises from the ghetto to become the right hand man of the Prince, but they have a falling out, and he is persecuted for being Jewish, and at the end, he discovers he is not actually Jewish, but he states that he is Jewish anyway, which leads to his doom) starring Conrad Veidt (in the title role as Joseph 'Jew Suss' Oppenheimer), Benita Hume, Frank Vosper, Cedric Hardwicke, and Gerald du Maurier (a very distinguished British stage actor who appeared in a handful of silent movies from 1917 to 1920, and in a handful of sound movies in the early to mid 1930s; he is the father of author Daphne du Maurier). Note that the movie had a very limited release in the U.S. in 1934 as "Power", because it was perceived as anti-Semitic, even though it was actually very much the opposite (there is an amazing bit of dialog where a friend of Veidt's tells him that there is no more anti-Semitism, saying "But it's 1730! anti-Jewish sentiment is a thing of the past!", and Veidt replies "No, my friend, they will be against us in 1830, and in 1930, too")! Also note that this movie was remade by the Nazis in 1940 as "Jud Suss", and the story was twisted so as to make it one of the most vile anti-Semitic films ever made.

Here are images of the front, back, and two interior pages:

Each week I will showcase a different pressbook (or related item) from my collection (so in just 25,000 weeks or so, I will have shared the entire collection with you!).