The 3rd Annual Hollywood Auction This Sunday

Tomorrow night, beginning at 8pm EST, Silverbanks Pictures will be hosting its third annual Hollywood Auction on eBay. For those of you who are not regular readers of Silver Scenes, Silverbanks Pictures is my sister and my home-based business, specializing in classic movie photos and other memorabilia.  This auction, our biggest of the year, will feature over 250 candids, stills, and publicity photos from the 1920s-1970s. 

We have a motley assortment of images this time around which include some rare candids of celebrities such as Betty Grable, Joan Crawford, and Cornel Wilde. The selection always changes and we never know what we will end up purchasing and later offering to the public via auction - but I think this year has some real gems hidden in the mix. 

If you would like to view all of the items going up on auction click here, other you can preview a small sample of what will be available to bid on simply by scrolling down below. 

Enjoy! 

Honor Blackman, Mervyn LeRoy, and Jean Seberg posing with Maria Cisternas after a publicity luncheon promoting "Moment to Moment"( 1966 )

Jill St. John is presenting an award to two unknown men in this 1960s publicity shot

John Fosythe and Lana Turner gaze into each other's eyes in this scene from "Madame X" ( 1966 )

William Eythe and Anne Baxter looking resplendent in a publicity photo for Lubitsch's "A Royal Scandal" ( 1946 )

Dorothy Lamour, for once, not pictured in a sarong!

James Stewart always had a passion for aviation. Here, he is talking with aviator Ben Howard and his wife Maxine "Mike", who was also an aviatrix. 

This looks like a scene from "The Third Man" but it's actually from "Journey into Fear" ( 1942 ). In case you didn't recognize him, that's Joseph Cotten pictured. 

A happy college foursome. Pictured are Bonita Granville, William Holden, Ezra Stone, and Judith Barrett. Stone was famous for being the voice of Henry Aldrich on radio and later, in the 1960s, he directed "The Addams Family" television series. 

Jack Carson, Janis Paige, Martha Vickers, and Dennis Morgan in "The Time, the Place, and the Girl" ( 1946 )

Joan Crawford is giving a big schmootz to a soldier before he heads off for Army training. 

The Searchers ( 1956 ) 

Susan Strasberg and Henry Fonda in "Stage Struck" ( 1958 )

Betty Grable with her two adorable girls, pictured off the set in 1955. 

Look how young Preston Foster looks here!

Jane Powell and Vic Damone looking great in Technicolor

Josef von Sternberg's The Last Command ( 1928 ) with Emil Jannings

That's Nelson Eddy singing with Jo Stafford ( egads, it's not Jeanette MacDonald! )

You'd never guess who this lovely woman is - it's the Madonna. She had only a brief appearance in "Ben-Hur" ( 1959 )

The Academy Award winning set design for "How Green Was My Valley" was created by Nathan Juran, who later became a director of Ray Harryhausen films. 

Roddy MacDowall and Lassie ( aka Pal ) in "Lassie Come Home" ( 1943 )

Lana Turner and Anthony Quinn talk behind the scenes during the making of "Portrait in Black" ( 1960 )

Bette Davis with Isreal Chas de Cruz and Frank Lloyd in the 1940s

Van Johnson and Sonja Henie went to the Ice Capades and ended up with the stars of the show asking for THIER autograph!

Dorothy Provine in London in the mid-1960s

Diana Lynn, looking pretty in this publicity photo for "The Kentuckian"

Chester Morris, on the RKO set, walking with a big grin on his face

Mickey Rooney as Huckleberry Finn ( 1939 )

Book Review - Hollywood in Kodachrome

Over 35 years ago John Kobal assembled a number of excellent coffee table books featuring stunning photography from Hollywood's golden era. Among these books was "Hollywood Color Portraits", which presented a beautiful collection of Kodachromes of some of Hollywood's biggest stars of the 1930s-1950s. Since the publication of this book there have been very few books offered to film fans that re-published the gorgeous color portrait photos of Hollywood's stars. 

That is, until 2013, when David Wills assembled "Hollywood in Kodachrome", a hefty collection of stunning color glamour photographs from 1940-1949, many of which were originally published on the covers of ( and as inserts in ) Motion Picture, Photoplay, Modern Screen, Movie Stars Parade, and Movie Story magazines. This five-pound 352-page hardcover book was beautifully printed by It Books, showcasing the images the way they were originally meant to be seen. 

Glamour icons such as Veronica Lake, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner, Betty Grable, Jane Russell, and Hedy Lamarr are all given ample coverage, but unfortunately many of the biggest actors of the time have few photographs. There were numerous color images made of Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney and yet few appear in this collection. Robert Taylor, William Powell, Ronald Colman are not even present in the book...nor are actresses such as Alice Faye, Ann Sothern, or Vivien Leigh. 

While "Hollywood in Kodachrome" does not offer the best selection of box-office stars of the 1940s, David Wills does give readers a background history of these color photographs and intersperses the images with some black-and-white behind-the-scenes shots showing the photographer and his subject in action. Small images of the printed covers of the magazines the photos appeared on also compliment the text. 

Hollywood in Kodachrome by David Wills and Stephen Schmidt is available for purchased for $24.86 through Amazon.