Film noir posters: the art of smoking guns and bared flesh Gone Girl may have all the hallmarks of a modern film noir, but it falls sadly short in one crucial respect: the poster. Whether it's photographs of evidence bags, Ben Affleck having vertical hold problems against a brooding sky, or Affleck with Rosamund Pike on a mortician's slab, the ad campaign is cool, clever - and a bit dull. Dull is an adjective you would never use to describe the posters from film noir's heyday in the Forties and Fifties, more than 350 of which are reproduced in The Art of Noir: The Posters and Graphics from the Classic Era of Film Noir by Eddie Muller. Jean-Luc Godard, who paid homage to Hollywood B-pictures in several of his early films, once famously said "all you need for a movie is a gun and a girl," and the posters hammer that idea home with unabashed promises of sex and violence. Film noir was first tagged as a genre by French cinephiles; the name they gave it was a deliberate echo of the Série Noire imprint of translated hard-boiled fiction from the likes of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M Cain, whose novels were providing source material for some of the most celebrated crime movies coming out of postwar Hollywood - films such as The Maltese Falcon, Farewell my Lovely and The Postman Always Rings Twice. The recurring noir protagonist is a conflicted and often doomed anti-hero who is invariably lured by a manipulative femme fatale into an Apache Dance of duplicity, lust and death. The setting was a world exhausted by war and permeated by moral ambiguity and an almost existential malaise. Many of the films were thrillers and B-pictures, lacking the prestige of critically feted dramas and unable to flaunt a glittering cast of A-list stars to entice the crowds. So the poster designers pumped up the exploitation angle. Whereas the films themselves were characterised by their shadowy black-and-white cinematography, the posters were riotous explosions of garish colour and eyepopping imagery. Hollywood production codes of the Forties decreed that crime should never pay and thatmurderers should never go unpunished, and there's little in classic noir, at least on the surface, that would shock today's desensitised audiences. But the posters themselves revel in what might be seen today as political incorrectness - lurid compendiums of phallic imagery, erotic display and mental derangement, whether it's Dan Duryea slapping Lizabeth Scott around in the artwork for Too Late for Tears (1949), non-PC cigarettes dangling from the lips of Robert Mitchum, John Garfield or Peggy Cummins, or sexy dames flouting fundamental fashion rules by flashing cleavage and leg at the same time. And of course there are guns, lots of guns - many of them brandished by the women, and most of them smoking. Looking at these posters from a modern perspective, it's not just nostalgia that makes them so extraordinary. In the days before poster artwork became almost exclusively photographic, and before the now ubiquitous Helvetica font was even invented, the artists and designers seem unconstrained by mealy-mouthed considerations of perspective, realism or what might constitute tasteful design - particularly in the European and Asian markets, a world away from the rather more puritanical United States. Whereas, for example, the American poster for Double Indemnity shows Barbara Stanwyck and FredMacMurray in a romantic clinch, with Edward G. Robinson looking on almost benignly, the Spanish one depicts MacMurray flanked by grotesque demons, a corpse on the railway tracks below him and Stanwyck smiling out at us. Nor were the non-American poster designers as anonymous as their Hollywood counterparts; the names of Anselmo Ballester, Bernard Lancy and Rolf Goetze deservedly live on in these works of art. This collection is a hallucinatory trove of looming green faces, insane photomontage, drunken typefaces and overwrought taglines: "HATE IS LIKE A LOADED GUN!," "MURDER! Some of the imagery is reminiscent of the covers of pulp paperbacks, but unlike book artwork it was always destined to be big, to seize the attention as a one-sheet, quad or billboard. And the very best are exquisite displays of creative skill and imagination, larger-than-life windows into a dangerous yet infinitely seductive world. The Art of Noir by Eddie Muller (Duckworth £19.99) is available to order from Telegraph Books at £17.99 + £1.95 p&p. Call 0844 871 151 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk