compiled by Bruce Hershenson
Crime Movie Posters is the fifth volume of The Illustrated History of Movies Through Posters. (The first four were: Cartoon Movie Posters, Cowboy Movie Posters, Academy Award Winners Movie Posters, and Sports Movie Posters. Still to come our volume six: Horror Movie Posters, and seven, More Cowboy Movie Posters.)
Crime Movie Posters consists of 72 full color pages, for a total of 376 posters and lobby cards. The collection begins with The Honor of the Force (1913), The Avenging Conscience (1914) and The Cipher Message (1913) and runs through the Twenties, Thirties, Forties, Fifties, Sixties, Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, ending with Natural Born Killers (1995). Pulp Fiction (1995), The Usual Suspects (1995), Gangstas (1996) and Fargo (1996).
The only flaw of this book is that it is too short. It could have been three times its current size and still hardly scratched the surface of all of the crime movie posters that exist. (And there is a dearth of foreign crime film posters, as well).
These posters are gorgeous works of art. Looking at them brings on nostalgia – the silents; Lon Chaney, Clive Brook, the early sounds; William Powell as Philo Vance, in the Thin Man series with Myrna Loy…the movie series popular in the 30s and 40s; Warner Oland as the villainous Fu Manchu, and then as Charlie Chan…the Hildegarde Withers series, Boris Karloff as Mr. Wong, Bette Davis, Edward G. Robinson, Peter Lorre, George Sanders as The Saint, Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, Tom Conway, the 50s and the beginnings of film noir; Lawrence Tierney, Glen Ford, James Stewart, Brian Garfield, Gregory Peck, the sixties and seventies and ‘blaxploitation,’ and on an on and hundreds more stars.
It’s also educational to look at the posters as advertisements. Would they encourage you to go see the film in question? Pictured together, you can see the ‘trends’ in poster art, from images from moveis to faces of actors simply staring out at you.
This book brings on an enjoyable trip down nostalgia lane, and is highly recommended.
Bruce Hershenson, owner of the Bruce Hershenson Archive, has a collection of poster images from over 15,000 films, as well as tens of thousands of film pressbooks. Richard Allen is the owner of the Carson Collection archive, which was the primary source of images for Reel Art, selected as one of the hundred best film books ever made.
This review copyright
May 24, 2000.
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