1937
The Film Stars (1st Series) series, published by John Sinclair Ltd.—a historic tobacco manufacturer based in Newcastle upon Tyne—belongs to the "real photo card" genre: unlike the lithographic or hand-painted cards typical of manufacturers like Player's or Wills, Sinclair cards reproduce actual black-and-white promotional photographs, resembling a photographic postcard rather than an illustration. This makes them, even today, a particularly direct visual document of Hollywood and British stardom in the mid-1930s. The compact format, 1 ⅜" × 2 ⅝", was the standard format for cigarette cards included in packs as collectible gadgets, designed to be collected in special albums—a widespread practice in the United Kingdom between the wars. Each card features the name of the star (or stars, in the case of couples) on the front; the numbered back includes a short biography and the name of the film studio to which they belong. This first part, consisting of 54 cards, opens with 27 single portraits—from Shirley Temple and Clara Bow to character actors and supporting actors less well-known to today's general public such as Herbert Mundin, Colin Clive, and Toby Wing—beginning with card #28 onwards, followed by double cards dedicated to film couples, each explicitly linked to a specific film indicated on the back. An analysis of the twenty-seven titles thus identified reveals a chronological span between 1931 and 1934 (with a particular concentration in 1934, the most represented year), confirming that the photographic material used for the entire series of 108 cards was likely collected in the immediately preceding years, only to be published en masse in 1937—a circumstance which explains why collectors subsequently divided, for the sake of cataloguing, the single issue into "1st" and "2nd Series" of 54 cards each, despite the numbering (1-108) actually being continuous. Among the most memorable couples: Clark Gable and Joan Crawford in Dancing Lady (1933), Fredric March and Norma Shearer in Smilin' Through (1932), Henry Wilcoxon and Claudette Colbert in Cleopatra (1934), until the series closed with John Barrymore and Greta Garbo in Grand Hotel (1932). A curious case is the case of Change of Heart (1934), represented twice with two different couples (Janet Gaynor with James Dunn on card #31, and with Charles Farrell on #34): a sign of how the selection of images followed the logic of attracting the individual star rather than that of a systematic coverage of the filmography.