To Bathe in Filmic Waters

This is a continuing series of lists dedicated to the endangered art of movie posters. Each volume of Magnificent Movie Posters will contain five evocative, hand-picked examples intended to show just what movie posters are supposed to look like. Other volumes can be found here, and please click on each image for a larger version!

Anatomy of a Murder | Otto Preminger, 1959
American One-sheet by Saul Bass

One of America’s foremost poster artists of recent times, who was perhaps better known for his work on title sequences rather than posters, was New York-born graphic designer Saul Bass. Bass came to fame after creating the controversial title sequence Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm in 1955, and later went on to work closely with Alfred Hitchock, contributing to the films North By Northwest, Psycho and Vertigo. The style Bass usually employed for poster design concentrated on primary colours and the use of bold shapes. It is a style that is entirely unique, and has birthed many an iconic poster including this 1959 one -sheet for the Preminger movie Anatomy of a Murder. Once again, the design is very much a simple one – two basic colours and an image of a man lying prone – yet is strikingly effective. It is a design that was actually copied in 1995 for the Spike Lee film Clockers – an act that Bass regarded as theft despite it being intended as an homage.

Barry Lyndon | Stanley Kubrick, 1975
American One-sheet by Charles Gehm

This intricate poster for the Stanley Kubrick film Barry Lyndon was created by American artist and illustrator Charles Gehm in 1975. Unfortunately for Gehm, it is a poster that has been largely overlooked in favour of Jouineau Bourduge’s classic black and white print, which is actually the illustration still used for DVD covers today. In this case it may well be that the poster was deemed “too intricate” for wide usage, which is unfortunate considering the attention to detail and obvious work that has gone into it. That said, it can be noticed that the font used on both posters and during the opening credits of the film itself is in fact always the same – perhaps something decided on by Warner Bros. before hiring both artists – as is the depiction of both a pistol and a rose. Gehm’s poster might not be quite as iconic as Bourduge’s creation, but for me it better represents the epic and ultimately timeless nature of Kubrick’s celebrated tale.

The Shawshank Redemption | Frank Darabont, 1994
American One-sheet by Intralink Film Graphic Design

Emotional figures standing boldly in the rain is a common theme both in movies and on movie posters: from Cool Hand Luke to The Matrix, it is an image that has been re-imagined time and time again. Perhaps the most memorable of all these scenes is the moment in Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption when our protagonist, Andy Dufresne, finally escapes from Shawshank Prison after crawling through half a mile of raw sewage. The climactic music soars, the camera pulls out, and Andy drops to his knees to embrace the free world once again. The rain is there, as usual, to add something cinematic to what is a dramatic moment, but it also helps illustrate this idea of escaping from the prison and embracing nature after so long. It is by far and away the most iconic moment in a film full of memorable ones, and thus was probably the obvious choice to be immortalised in the poster.

Fargo | Joel & Ethan Coen, 1996
American One-sheet by Creative Partnership/Optic Nerve

I’ve heard some say that this poster is too gimmicky to be great, but for me the gimmick is precisely what makes it so wonderful. It was one of the early posters attached to Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo, and is of course a play on the film’s tagline: “A Homespun Murder Story” which essentially just points out – if the title isn’t enough of a hint – that the setting of Fargo, North Dakota is an important aspect of the story here. Unfortunately for all of us, distributors Gramercy Pictures pulled the poster from theaters very early on for fear that movie-goers would think the film too “arty”. Instead, it was replaced with a bolder and more accessible poster with the infinitely less entertaining tagline of  “Small town, big crime, dead cold”. While we should perhaps be thankful that this move only exposed more of the American public to what is an excellent film, it is still a shame that such a unique poster was lost to the corporate winds in such a way.

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman | Nathan Juran, 1958
American One-sheet by Reynold Brown

Reynold Brown was a prolific American artist who began his career drawing comic books in the thirties before moving on to magazine and advertisement illustrations and the designing of book covers after the second world war. Following this, Brown became a teacher in California which led to him landing a job designing posters for Universal Pictures. Throughout the fifties and sixties he painted a number of memorable posters for such Universal hits as Creature from the Black Lagoon, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Ben-Hur, Spartacus, The Alamo and of course Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Brown’s roots in art are of the realist mould, and I believe this is an influence you can clearly see in most of his poster work, especially here. There is a painstaking quality that can be found in each of his many posters, despite the often fantastical nature of the films upon which these posters are based.

Thank you for reading, and be sure to look out for new editions of Magnificent Movie Posters! Meanwhile, please feel free to list your own “magnificent” examples. Who knows? Perhaps we’ll use your choices as inspiration.

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