LOST HORIZON

Original British 17 inch x 44 inch Trade Advertisement removed from the British Film Trade Journal “The Cinema” for the 1937 Frank Capra Adventure LOST HORIZON, based on the novel by James Hilton and starring Ronald Colman, Jane Wyatt, Edward Everett Horton, John Howard, Thomas Mitchell, Margo, Isabel Jewell, H.B. Warner and Walter Connolly

A plane crash delivers a handful of people to a Tibetan Shangri-La where there’s no evil, rain, sickness, war or dying young – but is it the miraculous utopia it appears to be?

The advertisement artwork is by A. “Jock” W. Hinchliffe.
Hinchliffe was born in Perth, Scotland. In 1953 he had a studio in Chalk Farm, North London, where he produced a series of six oil paintings as publicity for 20th Century Fox’s “The Robe”. He had been engaged by Fox in 1926 and produced posters and ads continuously for them, and for Disney, well into the 1960s.

The reverse of the advertisement shows portraits of Frank Capra & Ronald Colman also by Hinchliffe plus photos of supporting cast, scriptwriter Robert Riskin and author James Hilton.

Trade advertisements are colourful posters aimed at cinema managers, which were either slipped in, or part of, the weekly film trade journals which were available to them by subscription but were not sold to the general public. The large size Trade advertisements are about the size of US half sheet posters and have a centre fold which is usually hard to discern when flat. Most were designed to be pulled out, and some were attached by staples. Most have the date in tiny letters in one of the top corners.
The publishers own copies from the 1930’s were destroyed by fire and water damage during the Blitz and Wartime paper drives decimated those held by cinemas making them quite rare.

The advertisement is in very good condition, on linen quality paper. There are 3 vertical folds. There is slight crinkling along the top edge and about an inch of splitting at the top of the centre fold.