As distractions go, playing cards have plenty to recommend them. A deck of cards is inexpensive, easily available, portable, and doesn’t need charging. And as the photos in this gallery show, the many games that people play with cards have the power to mesmerize folks from all walks of life.
LIFE’s photos of card players include a number of celebrities. Joe DiMaggio passes the time on a road trip playing casino with his teammates. Sophia Loren uses cards to pass a slow moment on a movie set. Actor Yves Montand gets in a few hands while his actress wife, Simone Signoret, gets made up for the Academy Awards.
But star shots aside, card games—whose history traces back to 9th-century China—are a truly democratic entertainment. Young boys play on the streets of Brooklyn, as do older gentlemen on the sidewalks of Paris. College girls play in a Connecticut dorm room, as do adults at an Illinois social club.
The games that they play vary: poker, bridge, gin rummy, hearts, pinochle, solitaire. Perhaps most striking is the variety of situations in which the cards come in handy. For the soldiers on the eve of battle in Luzon, the games may be a relief from stress, or boredom, or both. In a photo from a bridge club in Mapletown, N.J., a woman appears to be waging a battle against existential boredom—and losing.
That woman is an unhappy exception to the rule, though. In most photos, the players are utterly absorbed by their cards, their attention devoted to assessing what they have in their hands and figuring out what their next play should be.
For such a humble thing as a deck of cards, the depth of distraction they can achieve is really quite an accomplishment.
Actress Sophia Loren played cards with photographer Pierluigi in her trailer while fans waited outside during location filming of “Madame Sans Gene” in 1961.
Alfred Eisenstaedt / The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation
Sailors played cards below decks the night before the invasion of Luzon in the Phillipines in 1945.
The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation.
Joe DiMaggio played casino with his Yankees teammates on a 1939 train ride to a road game.
Carl Mydans/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation
Green Berets played poker at an outpost in Buon Brieng, Vietnam, 1964..
Larry Burrows/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation
Neighborhood boys played an intense card game of Hearts on the sidewalk next to an intersection in Red Hook, 1943.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation
Comedy legend Ernie Kovacs (left, light shirt) played poker with friends in 1957.
Ralph Morse/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation
Kenneth Trout and actress Ella Raines played gin rummy at the deck of a Nevada hotel; the couple were high school sweethearts who had married before his deployment as a bomber pilot during World War II, and LIFE chronicled their first real vacation together in its July 30, 1945 issue. The couple divorced in December of that year.
Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation
A couple played cards in their motor home, 1970.
Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation
Actor Yves Montand (second from the right) played cards while his wife, actress Simone Signoret, had her hair done in a Beverly Hills Hotel room hours before the 32nd Annual Academy Awards in 1960; she would win Best Actress.
Allan Grant/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation
Men played pinochle at a club in Rockford, Ill. in 1949.
Margaret Bourke-White/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation
Pin-up photos adorned the walls of a bomber-crew shack where soldiers played cards on Adak Island, Aleutian campaign, Alaska, 1943.
Dmitri Kessel / The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation
Women dressed up for an afternoon at their bridge club in Maplewood, N.J., 1947.
Nina Leen/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation
Ed Sullivan interfered with wife Sylvia, as she tried to play solitaire in their apartment, 1967.
Arthur Schatz/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation
Students in a Connecticut College dorm room, 1945.
Nina Leen/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation
Parisian men sat around packing crate and played a game of cards in square of the Ile de la Cite, 1963.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation
James Jones (right), author of From Here to Eternity, played cards with a group that included, from left to right, his wife Gloria, Bernie Frizzell and Addie Herder played poker during a party at his Paris residence, 1967.
Loomis Dean/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation
The card game went on a coffee house in New Hampshire as Estes Kefauver, in the background, campaigned for the Democratic nomination for president in 1952.
Peter Stackpole/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation
Designer Christian Berard played solitaire at his Paris home, 1948.
Dmitri Kessel/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation
