Film Posters Of The 40′s

• 7th Apr 2011

Edited by: Tony Nourmand and Graham Marsh

Tony Nourmand and Graham Marsh have edited together a beautiful series of books on the medium of film posters. This second release focussed on the film posters of the 1940’s.

The likes of Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Fred MacMurray, Robert Mitchum, Lana Turner, Victor Mature, Veronica Lake, Cary Grant and Orson Welles (who wins this decade’s award for green face on a poster for The Third Man) take centre stage, while the likes of Bette Davis retain stock in Hollywood from the 30’s.

This is where the classics really start to show their faces. Many people will be familiar with the artwork for Casablanca and Citizen Kane with beautiful water coloured looks. Stylistically it is a decade where painters got the majority of the work. If anything though ensemble dramas got the messiest posters, sometimes with just a collection of heads on a poster.

Conceptually though other artworks got to thrive such as various goes at The Third Man, and even taking on a bit of censorship with having as scantly clad women as possible on the posters.

Hitchcock started to release more prominent pictures – slowly building up to his golden age of cinema. But being the 40’s there is also time for some heavy film noir. So you can expect to see the likes of MacMurray in Double Indemnity, the original The Postman Always Rings Twice and Bogart in The Maltese Falcon.

All in all covering what there was from the states to Europe, it’s a fine second instalment to the series.

http://www.reelposter.com/books.php

Steven Hurst