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Leonard, Arthur H. [director].

[Poster for the early horror film <i>The Devil’s Daughter</i>.]

Cleveland, OH: Morgan Litho Corp [for:] Sack Amusement Enterprises, [1939]. One-sheet poster printed in red and blue, 41” x 27”. CONDITION: Folded, as issued; some light stains and rippling to verso of upper/outer folded panel (minimally visible on recto only in the left margin); a few small breaks at folds (with no losses) and occasional tiny snags or pinholes. Withall a very good bright copy, ideally suited for simple linen backing.

A highly pictorial original three-color one-sheet for the 1939 film based on a story and screenplay by George Terwilliger, starring an all African-American cast under the direction of Arthur H. Leonard, produced by Leonard and Harry Popkin, and released by the Sack Amusement Enterprises, one of the leading distributors of films with African-American casts from the late ‘20s through the 1940s. The film starred prominent actress Nina Mae McKinney, the first African-American actress to play a leading role in a mainstream film (Hallelujah! 1929) as Isabelle Walton. Her co-stars included Ida James (as Sylvia Walton), Jack Carter, Hamtree Harrington, Willa Mae Lang, and Emmett Wallace. Set in Jamaica, the film treats the rivalry between two half-sisters over control of a Jamaican plantation. McKinney plays the disinherited sister who managed the plantation prior to her father’s death, and James the sister who travels from New York to claim her inheritance. In an attempt to drive her sister back to New York, McKinney remains in hiding, employing various Obeah practices and instigating a gradually ascending constant drum beat to disturb her. Apart from the reference to the “Sensational Blood Dance,” the text legend on this one-sheet highlights the conflict “Sister against Sister in a Burning Drama of Love and Hate in the Tropics!”

Arthur and Lester Sack, as partners, established Sack Amusement Enterprises, a firm that owned theatres as well a distribution network specializing, in part, in African-American films, including several of those by Oscar Michaux and Spencer Williams. They were eventually headquartered in San Antonio and then in Dallas, where they owned the Lucas and the Coronet theatres, and partnered with Williams in the production of ten films in and around Dallas, among them such standards of the genre as Juke Joint, The Blood of Jesus, and Of One Blood. Promotional paper for their films ranges from uncommon to rare, a considerable portion of it having been displaced in the years before the closing in 1980 of one of the last remaining great regional film promotional paper distributors, Duncan Poster Service in Dallas.

Item #8073

Price: $1,500.00

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