Poker anyone?

EFSP loves to discover the niches of the film star postcard world. In 2016 we did a post with French playing cards with film stars. The photos were made in colour by the great Sam Lévin, probably around 1960. Recently, we found American Arcade cards designed like playing cards with a cowboy star in the centre. Arcade cards were issued from penny arcade vending machines located on seaside boardwalks of North America. There must have been several series of these playing-cards through the years while the first cards in this post date from 1928 and the last ones date from the 1950s. The first card seems to have a bullet hole. So, in which seaside saloon were these cards used for a tough game of poker? 


American Arcade playing-card card by Ex.[Exhibit] Sup[ply]. Co., Chicago, USA, 1928.

American actor William Farnum (1876-1953) was one of the first major movie stars. From 1914 to 1925, Farnum was one of the biggest sensations in Hollywood, earning $10,000 a week. Farnum's silent pictures include the Westerns The Spoilers (1914) - which culminates in a spectacular saloon fistfight, Drag Harlan (1920), and the drama-adventure If I Were King (1921).


American Arcade playing-card card by Ex.[Exhibit] Sup[ply]. Co., Chicago, USA, 1928.

Kermit Roosevelt 'Tex' Maynard (1897–1971) was an American stuntman, actor, and performer, who often worked as a stand-in for his brother cowboy hero Ken Maynard and other actors. Later he became a star in minor Westerns.


American Arcade playing-card card by Ex.[Exhibit] Sup[ply]. Co., Chicago, USA, 1928.

Antonio 'Tony' Moreno (1887-1967) was a Spanish-born American actor and film director of the silent film era and through the 1950s. In his early films, Moreno was often typecast as the 'Latin Lover' opposite such stars as Pola Negri, Alice Terry, and Greta Garbo. However, throughout his career, he also played cowboys in such Westerns as The Border Legion (1924), Romance of the Rio Grande (1929) and John Ford's classic The Searchers (1956).


American Arcade playing-card card by Ex.[Exhibit] Sup[ply]. Co., Chicago, USA, 1928. Paramount.

Ricardo Cortez (1900-1977) was an American screen actor and director, who peaked in the 1920s as Paramount's romantic lover opposite the big female stars of the decade. He also starred in Kames Cruze's classic silent Western The Pony Express (1925). In the 1930s he played the first Sam Spade on the screen.


American Arcade card by Ex.[Exhibit] Sup[ply]. Co., Chicago, USA, 1928.

The story of Jack Luden (1902-1951) is one of the saddest in Hollywood. Convicted of heroin possession and passing bad checks, the former cowboy star died in San Quentin State Prison.


American Arcade playing-card card.

Fred MacMurray (1908-1991) was an American actor and singer who appeared in more than 100 films and a successful television series during a career that spanned nearly a half-century, from 1935 to the 1970s. He often played the quintessential nice guy, but some of his strongest and best-remembered performances cast him against type as a villain such as in director Billy Wilder's Film Noir Double Indemnity (1944). MacMurray also starred in such Westerns as At Gunpoint (1955) and Gun for a Coward (1956).


American Arcade playing-card card.

From the 1950s, American film and television actor John Bromfield (1922-2005) became a famous TV western hero. In the middle 1950s, Bromfield appeared in westerns, such as NBC's Frontier anthology series in the role of a sheriff in the episode 'The Hanging at Thunder Butte Creek'. In 1956, Bromfield was cast as law enforcement officer Frank Morgan in the syndicated western-themed crime drama series The Sheriff of Cochise, and in its spin-off, U.S. Marshal. The real sheriff of Cochise County at the time, Jack Howard, visited the set when the program began and made Bromfield an honorary deputy.


American Arcade card.

John Lupton (1928-1993) was an American film and television actor. Lupton was tall, lanky, and boyishly handsome, very much like James Stewart or Henry Fonda, but he never achieved similar fame A reliable actor, if not particularly distinctive, he enjoyed a four-decade-long career with 260 credits in film productions and on television. His biggest claim to fame was as the co-star of the Western TV series Broken Arrow (1956).


American Arcade card in the Western Aces series. Pat Conway as Clay Collister in Tombstone Territory (1957-1960).

Pat Conway (1931-1981) was an American film and television actor best known for starring as Sheriff Clay Hollister on the Western television series Tombstone Territory (1957-1960). He was the grandson of silent screen actor Francis X. Bushman and the son of director Jack Conway.

The Arcade cards were manufactured by the Exhibit Supply Company of Chicago, which began issuing the cards in 1921 and continued to release new cards until 1966. Check out our first post on Arcade cards and a special one on the Arcade cowboys.