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 each week, the type of items you almost surely have never seen before, and which might not come up for sale for DECADES!

So below is the pressbook from Samuel Goldwyn's The Best Years of Our Lives, the classic 1946 William Wyler return-from-World War II (WWII) romantic love triangle military melodrama ("From the Novel by MacKinlay Kantor"; Best Director & Best Picture Academy Award winner; about three servicemen returning from World War II and the difficulties they face in returning to civilian life after years at war; one of the three is a man who lost his hands during the war, and he was played by a real life veteran) starring Myrna Loy, Fredric March (in his Best Actor Academy Award winning role), Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, Virginia Mayo, Hoagy Carmichael, Steve Cochran, Cathy O'Donnell, and Harold Russell (in his Best Supporting Actor Academy Award winning role; the real-life veteran who lost his hands in WWII). Note that this movie premiered in the U.S. in November of 1946 (no doubt to qualify for the Academy Awards), but all of the U.S. paper has a 1947 NSS number.

Here is an image of the pressbook's covers and an interior spread (note that one looking at these posters would likely think this was surely a cheery light-hearted family romantic comedy!):

   

Each week I will showcase a different pressbook (or related item) from my collection (so in just 20,000 weeks or so, I will have shared the entire collection with you!). And remember to check out our previous Cool Items of the Week in our Cool Item of the Week archive (which is fully searchable!).