Heavy Eskimo Petting for Valentine’s Day

For all you lovers, here’s a lobby card promoting the steamy silent picture “”Frozen Justice.” Check out the pair of noses here!!

I found this among a great collection of lobby cards on the Vanity Fair website. They were taken from a private collection of a screenwriter named Leonard Schrader, the brother of Paul Schrader and writer of such films as “Mishima” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman”. If you have any passing interest in graphic design, you must visit it. You’ll be amazed at some of the designs they used to promote movies, most of which you’ve probably never heard of.

Looking at these piques my curiosity in the same way that watching old melodramas does. I try and imagine what it was like to live in a small town in Ohio and go to the movies about glamorous people in Manhattan or LA. Back in a period before WWII, when people very rarely traveled outside of their close geographic area, did these images feel tantalizing or bizarre? Did the art deco apartments filled with tuxedoed men and gowned women incite envy or repudiation or wonder or despair or disgust? When radio and an occasional movie was many Americans’ only link to someplace outside of their immediate county, were the messages strong enough to make people dissatisfied with their lives?

Today we practically swim in media (in the future, some god-awful technology will probably allow us to do it literally), whose sole purpose is to distract us from our daily lives, which honestly are a helluva lot easier than those led in the Roaring 20s and the Depression. In the past, a movie was a treat you enjoyed at the end of a week; now it’s something you can watch on your phone while waiting for a bus, or on YouTube when you’re wasting time at work. Has our relationship with these “treats” changed the way we feel about our lives, our friends and family, our purpose in life? I’d say yes, but I can’t articulate how. I need a screenwriter to feed me some snappy dialog.