the stripping away of the culture's underlying innocence. Studio advertising had been previously aimed at females, but film noir was marketed to capture the growing audience of disillusioned, distrustful males, recently returned home from the war. The films frequently deal with alienated men on the fringe of a callous urban environment. The images on these posters capture this mood as vividly as the movies themselves.
The Hollywood posters included here also reveal a milestone in graphic design. As Americans grew more accustomed to photographic imagery in wartime newsreels, weekly magazines, and then television, people gradually came to distrust the embellishments of illustrators. "Truth in advertising," came to mean photography. This was equally true in the entertainment industry. Painted pin-up girls were fine for fighter planes and calendars, but indreams, but always battling against their imminent dismissal.
One of the undercurrents in noir is the individual's struggle against, and eventual defeat by, the grinding gears of an omnipotent, faceless "organization." It is, of course, just such a bureaucracy that produces movie posters today, a stultifying process of art by committee, the sole purpose of which is to achieve the marketer's optimum combination of boldness and blandness. It's no wonder, really, that we've grown to treasure the uniqueness of vintage posters.
The films represented here were all produced in the United States, primarily between 1940 and 1960, though one of the book's themes is how artists of other countries depicted the peculiarly American phenomenon of noir. The artwork is also arranged to spotlight the cinematic contributions of essential, as well