Exceedingly rare vintage blue fountain pen signature on a 4x5-inch off-white album page, acquired in-person in the 1930s. In good condition, with slight trimming to the edges, and suitable for matting with a favorite photograph. Note that the image of the star shown alongside the scan of the autograph shown here is not included with the signed piece. After a successful stage career in his native Germany, England and then the States, Frank Reicher directed a handful of silent films, including The Secret Sin (1915), The Sowers (1916) and Public Opinion (1916), all starring Blanche Sweet. At the onset of the talkie era, he found new work as a character actor, playing humorless, wizened college professors, physicians, scientists, cabinet ministers, and military men, as in John Ford's first sound film, Napoleon's Barber (1928), and Mara Hari (1931). In 1933, he portrayed Captain Engelhorn in King Kong, reprising his role in Son of Kong later that year. He was thereafter a regular in horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and mystery films, more often than not, as murder victims, killed off twice by Boris Karloff, in Invisible Ray (1936) and House of Frankenstein (1944), and strangled by Lon Chaney, Jr., in the opening sequence of The Mummy's Ghost (1944). He was also memorable, for as long as he remained alive, in Charlie Chan in Egypt (1933), Life Returns (1935), Tod Browning's The Devil-Doll (1936), Dr. Cyclops (1940), Night Monster (1942), The Mummy's Tomb (1942), Beyond the Blue Horizon (1942), I Married an Angel (1942), Gildersleeve's Ghost (1944), Captain America (1944), Charlie Chan in the Jade Mask (1945), The Strange Case of Mr. Gregory (1946), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), and Superman and the Mole-Men (1951).  During the Second World War, he shifted gears to play ruthless Nazis in films like To Be or Not to Be (1942), The Hitler Gang (1944) and Mission to Moscow (1944). This is just the fourth example of his autograph we've ever offered.

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