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Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird, the 1940 Walter Lang fantasy melodrama (based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck) starring Shirley Temple, Spring Byington, Nigel Bruce, Gale Sondergaard, Eddie Collins, Sterling Holloway, Scotty Beckett, Sybil Jason, Laura Hope Crews, and Johnny Russell. Note that this was 20th Century-Fox's "answer" to MGM's huge success with "The Wizard of Oz"! Shirley Temple had been considered for Dorothy, and Gail Sondergaard was the original choice for the Wicked Witch (she quit days before filming, because the Wicked Witch was made ugly instead of beautiful!). However, this movie was not very successful at the box office, even with Miss Temple in the lead role, and she had been 20th Century-Fox's number one star through the mid to late 1930s. Note that Sybil Jason was born in South Africa, but was a singing and dancing child prodigy in England from the age of 2. When she was 6, Jack Warner saw her perform, and signed her to a contract hoping she could be a child star for Warner Bros. to equal Shirley Temple at 20th Century-Fox. However, after a few movies, including starring opposite Al Jolson in "The Singing Kid", she did not deliver the hoped for results, and Warner Bros. did not renew her contract in 1938. Daryl Zanuck signed her at 20th Century-Fox, putting her with Shirley Temple in "The Little Princess". She was supposed to have a major role in this movie, opposite Shirley Temple, but most of her scenes were cut from the movie (perhaps because it was feared she would "upstage" Shirley Temple, who was "getting old"!), and she "retired". In 1947, at the age of 18, she married a Navy man, and they had a child and were married for 58 years until his passing in 2006, and she passed away in 2011 at the age of 83!
NOTE: Click on linked names to see a biography.

Important Added Info: Note that first release 1940 posters and lobby cards from this movie are incredibly rare. We have only auctioned two one-sheets (26 and 28 years ago!) and a mini window card from this movie (but NO lobby cards at all) until we received this title card! 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.

We are doing something in this set of auctions we rarely do! A couple of years ago, we were approached by a very long time collector, and he asked us if he could give us an entire auction of single lobby cards by himself. We agreed, and held that auction in 2017, and later that same year, a different collector sent us a different group of 999 lobby cards and we repeated the process. Now we have a third such "single owner" collection. This one was originally assembled in Australia, which is why some of the cards have either Australian paper snipes attached or Australian ratings stamps (but many do not have them). This collection originally contained 1,100 cards, and we auctioned 100 of them in our March Major Auction, and now we are auctioning the remaining 999 in THIS set of auctions, and after this auction, there will be no more cards to be offered. As will immediately be evident when you look at the cards, many of them are from titles where you almost never see any lobby cards, so this is a rare opportunity to acquire many cards that almost never are offered for sale or at auction!

Our address for UPS or FedEx only is:
Bruce Hershenson,
306 Washington Avenue, West Plains, MO 65775