A Unique Hand-Drawn & Watercolour Painted c.1940 Guernsey Film Advertising Poster; Rebecca

Origin: British
Period: Mid Twentieth Century
Provenance: Unknown
Date: c.1940
Height: 26 inches
Width:  18 inches
Condition: B
The Whole: 29.5 x 21.5 inches

The hand drawn and painted Guernsey film advertising poster in the Art Deco taste, shown in a Guernsey cinema during the German occupation of Guernsey, advertising the film Rebecca of 1940, starring Laurence Olivier & Joan Fontaine and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, the arrangement composed in watercolours on marbled paper.

Condition is very good; there is some light creasing and crinkling where the poster has been folded prior to being framed, but there are no tears or holes. The poster is presented in a large simple frame, glazed and ready to hang.

Rebecca is the classic Hitchcock gothic thriller and a compelling mystery ( and haunting ghost story) about a tortured romance released in 1940. Based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier (1938) The film won two Academy Awards. I

In Guernsey names such as the Lyric Hall, Central Hall, The People’s Palace (also known as Billy Bartlett’s or The Flea Pit), St. Julian’s Hall (later The Gaumont) and the North Cinema were all familiar to the Guernsey public from the late 1920s and early 1930s onwards. One of the biggest, the Regal Cinema, was built in 1937 in inimitable Art Deco style and re-named the Odeon in 1948. All of Guernsey’s cinemas were closed after the air-raid on St. Peter Port on 28th June 1940 by the German Luftwaffe, but were re-opened shortly after the Island was occupied by German forces. At the Regal, German films were initially shown on 2 nights every week, but by the end of 1941 the programme was exclusively German, making this posters survival quite remarkable.

A unique poster, which in the world of film advertising is a rare thing, the artwork having a deliciously simple deco elegance, created in a time where cinema provided a much-needed escape from the trappings of wartime Britain.