The unique teaser posters for Ealing’s post-war émigré drama Frieda

“Would you take Frieda into your home?” demands the poster for Ealing Studios’s Frieda (1947). Based on a 1946 play by Ronald Millar, Frieda was one of the earliest British films to explore the post-war transition to peace and extremely topical and painful questions around guilt, culpability and forgiveness.

It stars David Farrar as a schoolmaster-turned-RAF officer who marries the German nurse (Mai Zetterling) who saved his life. It’s a decision prompted by guilt, gratitude and compassion rather than love; he believes she can have a better life in England than in war-shattered Germany. But Frieda’s arrival in her new husband’s small town immediately creates tensions in the family home and in the community more widely.

The question of how to feel about Frieda – and by extension the German nation more widely, drives the film’s publicity campaign and positions it as a film to spark conversation (“the film that puts the question”). This debate is drawn out through this series of teaser posters which take the form of a vox pop canvassing a range of (fictional) opinions.

The teasers are developed from the film’s official release poster and create a holistic campaign, designed and masterminded by Ealing’s advertising director S. John Woods. They share the same questioning tagline, graphic identity and expanded colour palette, but converts the central photographic image of Mai Zetterling into a fragile, childlike figure rendered in a line drawing by Eric Fraser. 

The effect is to turn the character of Frieda into a more abstract concept around which to frame the wider debate. As a series of negative white lines she recedes against the darker background of the poster, while the focus switches to the opinion-giver, their photograph foregrounded and opinions rendered in strong black type framed within the same recurring graphic block of colour.

For S. John Woods, a poster had three sequential purposes: “to attract attention, to arouse interest, and [to] influence subsequent action”. This can be seen in practice through this campaign which initially draws the eye through its strong graphics and colour contrasts, and then (repeatedly) posits a question to arouse curiosity. It’s easy to see how this thought-provoking approach, the promise of drama suggested by the interviewees’ generally hostile responses, and the use of an appealing new (Swedish) star alongside established British favourites David Farrar and Flora Robson could work to lure audiences into the cinemas to further ponder this question themselves.

Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.