CHEER BOYS CHEER

Original British 17 inch x 11 inch Trade Advertisement from The Daily Film Renter for the 1939 Anthony Kimmins Ealing Studios Comedy CHEER BOYS CHEER starring Nova Pilbeam, Edmund Gwenn, Jimmy O’Dea, Moore Marriott, Graham Moffatt, C.V. France, Alexander Knox and Peter Coke.

Two young lovers are caught on either side of a dispute over the territorial ambitions of the monolithic Ironside brewery against an ‘olde-worlde’, traditional family-run concern, Greenleaf.

The film has been compared to Ealing Studios itself: small scale and cosy, run by a close-knit family that speaks its own language and only shows its steely core when the chips are down. It has also been seen as an allegory for the behaviour of the Nazis in the run up to the war. References to Ironside’s territorial ambitions, the language of annexation, the use of grandiose fascist art deco design – to say nothing of the shot of Ironside reading Mein Kampf – are quite explicit.

On the reverse are 6 images of exploitation for the 1939 Tim Whelan Thriller Q PLANES starring Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Valerie Hobson, George Curzon, George Merritt, Gus McNaughton, Hay Petrie, John Longden and Ronald Adam.

A quirky British Secret Service Agent named Major Hammond tries to discover who is using a secret weapon to steal experimental planes.

The Advertisement is in good to very good condition with a strip of linen tape down the left edge and a short tear at the bottom edge.

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.