Bifold promotional advertisements printed on rectangular off-white paper for the film “Four Sons.” The front page features a woman in right three quarter profile, wearing a white bonnet and dark dress, gazing upwards. In the center, behind her, are the faces of three men, who are being embraced from behind by the skeletal hands of the dark, ghostly silhouette of a soldier in a helmet. Below them is an illustration of a farmhouse on rolling hills dotted with trees. Slightly separated on the right side of the image is the face of a young man in a white, collared shirt. The title is printed in bold, white letters across the top, and the background is blue, with three abstract warplanes on the right side. When the leaves are open, a green-and-white, double-page advertisement spans the center of the opposite side. In the top left corner are two quotes in white text, and the bottom right quarter of the page contains the film title and credits in green over a white circle with jagged edges. The remaining space is filled with seven candid images and scene stills from the film. The back page features a vertically-oriented schedule of film showings in black ink. Featuring: Don Ameche as Chris, George Ernest as Fritz, Alan Curtis as Karl, Robert Lowery as Joseph, Eugenie Leontovich as Frau Bern, Mary Beth Hughes as Anna, Sig Rumann as Newmann, others unidentified.
No restrictions on access
Restrictions on use. Copyright status is unknown.
The advertisement was donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2018 by Ken Sutak and Sherri Venokur.
The Cinema Judaica Collection consists of more than 1,200 objects relating to films about World War II and the Holocaust as well as Jewish, Israeli, and biblical subjects, from 1923 to 2000, from the United States, Europe, Israel, Canada, Mexico, and Argentina. The collection was amassed by film memorabilia collector Ken Sutak, to document Holocaust-and Jewish-themed movies of the World War II era and the postwar years. The collection includes posters, lobby and photo cards, scene stills, pressbooks, trade ads, programs, magazines, books, VHS tapes, DVDS, and 78 rpm records. Sutak organized these materials into two groups, “Cinema Judaica: The War Years, 1939–1949” and “Cinema Judaica: The Epic Cycle, 1950–1972” and, in conjunction with the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Museum (now the Dr. Bernard Heller Museum in New York), organized exhibitions on these two themes in 2007 and 2008. Sutak subsequently authored companion books with the same titles.
Overall: Height: 8.875 inches (22.543 cm) | Width: 12.000 inches (30.48 cm)
Advertisement for the American feature film “Four Sons,” released by 20th Century-Fox in June 1940. The film was a remake of a 1928 film by the same name, set in Bavaria before and during World War I. The 1940 remake was set during the late 1930s in the Czechoslovakian region along the German border known as the Sudetenland. It focuses on a mother and her four sons, who have divided political loyalties. One son enlists in the Czech army and clashes with his brother who joins the Nazis. A third brother is drafted by the German army after the Sudetenland was annexed in 1938, while the fourth brother, an artist, escapes the same fate by immigrating to the United States. Three of the four brothers are killed as a result of the war, and the mother, her daughter-in-law, and grandson set out to immigrate to the United States. Advertising for “Four Sons” was the first to use imagery of the “specter of death,” a common theme of interventionist political cartoons and editorials. This led to threats on the studio from the German consul-general. This object is one of more than 1,200 objects in the Cinema Judaica Collection of materials related to films about World War II and the Holocaust as well as Jewish, Israeli, and biblical themes.
United States advertisement for the film “Four Son" (1940)