Recently acquired: Ross Verlag XXL

During the 1930s, Ross Verlag in Berlin published film star cards in several formats: you could collect postcards in different sizes, but also very small cigarette cards and big collectors cards in an XXL format. These XXL cards were produced in the late 1930s. They were printed in black and white and have no text or lines on the flipside. We recently acquired a series of these cards with glamorous female film stars and starlets. For this post, we selected 12 of these cards.


Big German card by Ross Verlag. Photo: Paramount.

American actress and singer Dorothy Lamour (1914-1996) is best remembered for appearing in the Road to... comedies, starring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. During World War II, Lamour was among the most popular pin-up girls among American servicemen.


Big German card by Ross Verlag. Photo: Ufa.

Maria von Tasnady (1911-2001) was a Hungarian singer, stage, and film actress.


Big German card by Ross Verlag. Photo: Paramount Pictures.

Blonde Mae West (1895-1982) was a seductive, overdressed, endearing, intelligent, and sometimes vulgar American actress and sex symbol. She featured a come-hither voice, aggressive sexuality, and a genius for comedy. West started in Vaudeville and on the stage in New York, and later moved to Hollywood to star in such films as I’m No Angel (1933), She Done Him Wrong (1933), and Klondike Annie (1936). She was one of the first women in the cinema to consistently write the films she starred in.


Big German card by Ross Verlag. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

American actress Paulette Goddard (1905-1990) started her career as a fashion model and as a Ziegfeld Girl in several Broadway shows. In the 1940s, she became a major star of Paramount Pictures. She was Charlie Chaplin's leading lady in Modern Times (1936), and The Great Dictator. Goddard was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for So Proudly We Hail! (1943). Her husbands included Chaplin, Burgess Meredith, and Erich Maria Remarque.


Big German card by Ross Verlag. Photo: Paramount.

American film actress Carole Lombard (1908–1942) was the highest-paid star in Hollywood in the late 1930s. She was particularly noted for her energetic, ditzy, and often off-beat roles in screwball comedies of the 1930s.


Big German card by Ross Verlag. Photo: Paramount.

Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) is regarded as the first German actress to become successful in Hollywood. Throughout her long career, she constantly re-invented herself, starting as a cabaret singer, chorus girl, and film actress in 1920s Berlin, she became a Hollywood movie star in the 1930s, a World War II frontline entertainer, and finally an international stage show performer from the 1950s to the 1970s. Eventually, she became one of the entertainment icons of the 20th century.


Big German card by Ross Verlag. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Lovely, blonde Muriel Evans (1910-2000) was an innocent-eyed actress of the late 1920s and 1930s She was best known for her many appearances in popular B-Westerns alongside Tom Mix, John Wayne, and Buck Jones. For this, she won a Golden Boot Award.


Big German card by Ross Verlag. Photo: Ernst Sandau, Berlin.

Polish film actress Pola Negri (1897-1987) achieved fame and notoriety as a femme fatale in German and American silent films between the 1910s and 1930s. Negri was an overnight sensation in Ernst Lubitsch's Madame du Barry/Passion (1919). She moved to Hollywood where she became a star and lived in a palace, modeled after the White House.


Big German card by Ross Verlag. Photo: Dührkoop.

Sexy German dancer and film actress La Jana (1905-1940) was the most popular showgirl of Berlin in the 1930s. She appeared in 25 European films, often dancing in exotic costumes. In 1940, she suddenly died of pneumonia and pleurisy.


Big German card by Ross Verlag. Photo: Paramount.

Ida Lupino (1918-1995) was an English-American actress and singer, who became a pioneering director and producer—the only woman working within the 1950s Hollywood studio system to do so. With her independent production company, she co-wrote and co-produced several of her own social-message films, and was the first woman to direct a Film Noir, The Hitch-Hiker (1953). In her 48-year career, she acted in 59 films and directed 8, mostly in the United States, where she became a citizen in 1948. The majority of her later career as an actress, writer, and director was in television, where she directed more than 100 episodes of productions ranging across Westerns, supernatural tales, situation comedies, murder mysteries, and gangster stories.


Big German card by Ross Verlag. Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).

American actress Joan Crawford (1905-1977) became nationally-known as a flapper by the end of the 1920s. In the 1930s, her fame rivaled, and later outlasted, MGM colleagues Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo. Crawford often played hardworking young women who find romance and success. These 'rags-to-riches' stories were well received by Depression-era audiences and were popular with women. Crawford became one of Hollywood's most prominent movie stars and one of the highest-paid women in the United States, but her films began losing money and by the end of the 1930s she was labeled 'Box Office Poison'. But her career gradually improved in the early 1940s, and she made a major comeback in 1945 by starring in Mildred Pierce, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress.


Big German card by Ross Verlag. Photo: Paramount.

Lona Andre (1915-1992) was an American film actress, golfer, and businesswoman. During the 1930s, she played in around 50 B-films. The major feature of the attractive actress was her cute dimples.

More, more, more? Check out our Flickr album Ross Verlag XXL.