The 12-page pressbook for National General’s The Light at the Edge of the World (1971) from It Came From Hollywood. Paul says: “It’s a pretty standard NG pressbook, pretty low on frills, but it did come with one outstanding item you didn’t often find within a pressbook. It is a theater herald mock-up with fantastic artwork, and printed on parchment paper. I’ve included a scan of the herald along with a photo. The scan kind of flattens out the greatness of the herald, so I included a photo so people could get a finer look at it. This is another one of those books I’ve had for years but only recently cracked-open to do a scan on. The herald was in the middle of the book, so I had no idea it was there.”
Not a box office fire cracker, this Spanish-American adventure movie was a passion project for Kirk Douglas. Based on the Jules Verne novel, the script turned much darker as pirates mix it up with shipwrecked survivors. The movie adds a female character not in the novel, Arabella, played by Samantha Eggar. It’s a period film set in 1865 centered around a lighthouse. The pirates screw up the light to wreck ships and collect the floating booty. Kirk Douglas as Denton aims to rescue Arabella and stop the pirates. The captain leading the more brutish pirates is Kongre (Yul Brynner), and, of course, he’s cultured but sadistic (a character that Brynner could easily pull off).
Just given what I wrote above, the movie is well worth a watch, but just not one for the 1970s, a decade when movies were transitioning in the New Hollywood. Hard to say what killed the buzz on the movie, but period films were plentiful in the 1970s. By 1975, the birth of the blockbuster kicked in too. While marketed as a Jules Verne adventure, it was not suitable for family audiences given its darker and violent tone and scenes, although the U.S. release to theaters was edited to PG, so the re-editing, the poor miniature work, and the overall tone of an “older” movie, at a time when younger audiences were taking up more seats in theaters, pretty much ran the movie aground.
