of expatriate European directors with the cynical, hardboiled school of American fiction. The result was a new cultural mythology, a black market that provided an alternative to the gleefully optimistic knickknacks Hollywood traditionally peddled, and poster art needed to be as alluring and dark as the product it was selling. The images of gaiety, affluence, and true love that had adorned studio-produced paper were transformed, in the years following the war, to depict the unrelenting hunger of desperate, distrustful combatants scratching for any advantage.
Interest in noir has risen steadily in recent years and has never been stronger. In the poster collector's market, it's the segment that has seen the steepest rise in value. Dealers apply the label to any vintage film with cops and robbers, and its descendant,"neo-noir," to any contemporary art films featuring anti-social, well-armed protagonists. As a result, bidders at auctions have steadily inflated the value of posters for movies like Blonde Ice and Repeat Performance, films that, almost certainly, the buyers have not seen and probably never will.
What's the attraction? It must be the imagery, simultaneously innocent and incendiary, naive and nasty, featuring a blatant commingling of sex and violence that would fail to meet today's standard for political correctness. The irony, of course, is that, in the films themselves, no depiction of sex or bloodletting is too extreme for today's audiences, but many of these fifty-year-old posters, for comparatively tame films, today would be rejected as inappropriate for mainstream advertisements
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, films began to reflect