FALSE PRETENSES (1935) Betty Compson, Edward Gargan & Irene Ware on Ship's Deck

Description

Vintage original 11x14 in. US lobby card
from the 1930's poverty row comedy/romance
FALSE PRETENSES
, released in 1935 by the Chesterfield Motion Picture Corporation and
directed by Charles Lamont
. A girl (Irene Ware) who's just lost her job meets a drunk millionaire (Sidney Blackmer) on a bridge who's just lost his money. They go back to his house and eventually come up with a plan to benefit them both: he'll scrounge enough money together to teach her how to be a lady and then introduce her to his rich friends so she can snag a husband, after which she'll pay him a finder's fee.
The image features an "exterior" medium shot on the outer deck of a yacht as Clarissa Stanhope (
Betty Compson
) watches her competition, Mary Beekman (
Irene Ware
), talking with Mike O'Reilly (
Edward Gargan
), who is the aide to millionaire Kenneth Alden (Sidney Blackmer) whom both women are interested in. The outer walls of the yacht have a unique diagonal patterned design on them. The colors on the lobby cards from this film are stunning and this one features beautiful vivid shades of dark green, orange, blue and purple.
The Chesterfield company logo (which features a silhouette of a mid-19th century man wearing a large top hat with two motion picture film reels beneath him on either side) is depicted in the bottom right corner inside a red and yellow patterned design.
This vintage original lobby card is in very fine- condition with only a 1.25 in. diagonal crease on the top right corner that just barely enters the upper background area with a small water stain on the outer edges of this corner; a light 0.75 in. diagonal crease on the bottom right corner within the borders only; and a light unobtrusive 0.5 in. horizontal crease in the dark blue/purple background area near the left border beneath the top outer railing that they are leaning on. There are no pinholes, tears, stains or other flaws. The amazing color tints are as fresh and vibrant as when this card was printed in 1935.
Chesterfield Motion Pictures Corporation,
generally shortened
to Chesterfield Pictures,
was an American film production company of the 1920's and 1930's. Its low-budget films were intended as second features which played on the lower-half of a double bill. The company was headed by George R. Batcheller and worked in tandem with its sister studio, Invincible Pictures, which was led by Maury Cohen. The company never owned its own studio and so rented studio space at a variety of other companies, including Universal Pictures and RKO.  It was one of a number of Poverty Row studios taken over by Herbert Yates in 1935 and merged into his newly-formed Republic Pictures in an attempt to create a dominant low-budget producer with enough power to take on the major studios. Republic was generally successful in achieving this over the next twenty years.