Black Film History Universal Pictures Lobby Card Showing Black Performers in Skullduggery 1970

Skullduggery

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Skullduggery, 1970, lobby card showing Burt Reynolds and Roger C. Carmel amid nearly two dozen Black background performers in Universal Pictures’ adventure film about the discovery and exploitation of the fictional Tropis. Directed by Gordon Douglas and adapted by Nelson Gidding from Vercors’ 1952 novel Les Animaux dénaturés, the film uses the supposedly apelike Tropis and their enslavement as the basis for a courtroom argument over the boundary between human and animal. The lobby card is particularly notable for the prominence of Black performers within imagery advertising a film whose narrative explicitly concerns slavery, human classification, and the denial of personhood. The production was filmed in Jamaica rather than Papua New Guinea, making it inappropriate to identify these performers as African American without further evidence.

Skullduggery. USA: Universal Pictures, 1970. Full color lobby card measuring 11 x 14 inches. Against a bright yellow field, the principal image shows Burt Reynolds and Roger C. Carmel climbing a hillside past nearly two dozen Black performers. An illustrated Tropi appears at lower left, while production credits and the Universal Pictures, Technicolor, and Panavision marks appear at lower right. The upper caption asks, “The Tropi: Was it human? animal? or the living descendant of the missing link!” and describes “a band of adventurers” entering the New Guinea jungle in search of the creature. The film follows an expedition that encounters the Tropis, who are subsequently exploited as unpaid labor; after one is killed, a trial addresses whether the Tropis are legally human or animal.

The film was released in 1970, when American cinema was increasingly addressing race, colonialism, and social hierarchy, although Skullduggery did so through the problematic device of invented “missing link” characters and a predominantly Black visual population surrounding its white stars. The card therefore records both Universal’s promotion of the film and the racial imagery through which its allegory of slavery and human classification was presented to audiences. Bright image with strong color. Overall very good condition. A theatrical advertising piece documenting the visual treatment of race in an unusual 1970 Hollywood adventure centered on enslavement and contested definitions of humanity.

Item #20261

Price: $85.00