HEIGHT OF TERROR

There's nothing harder than facing your worst fear.

The poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 thriller Vertigo, designed by Saul Bass, is one of the most famous and influential promos ever made. Bass actually can’t take full credit for it—he oversaw its creation, but the unique spiral pattern was made by John Whitney and the figures were drawn by Art Goodman. Bass and Co. made a couple of similar versions of the poster for the film’s U.S. run. We showed you one a while back, and now the above version completes the pair.

If you haven’t seen Vertigo, we can’t tell you much that hasn’t already been written. Four years after starring in Rear Window Jimmy Stewart plays another damaged man for Hitchcock, a San Francisco detective who has a fear of heights, the result of a rooftop chase gone wrong. He later gets involved in a mystery that puts his acrophobia to the ultimate test.

Many say this is Hitchcock’s best movie. We don’t think so, but it’s definitely a landmark, particularly as it relates to co-star Kim Novak’s role, its opening action sequence, and its reliance upon San Francisco locations to help tell its story. In fact, the latter aspect was why the film’s world premiere took place in San Francisco today in 1958. Below you see some screen grabs, along with a beautiful promo poster that was made for the movie’s run in India. Put Vertigo in your queue.

Hmm, I think maybe I’ll just keep this for myself.

Above, a promo image of the beautiful Kim Novak from the 1958 Academy Awards at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. She wasn’t nominated that year, though her hit film Vertigo was eligible. Instead she accepted the statuette for Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium on behalf of winner Pierre Boulle, who had written the script for The Bridge on the River Kwai. No word on whether she ever actually gave him the Oscar.

Sandro Symeoni comes down with a case of Vertigo.

After focusing on Italian paperback artists lately, we thought today would be good for getting back to poster artists—namely Sandro Symeoni, who we’ve marveled at before. Symeoni veered from the realistic to abstract in style, and this very graphic poster for Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso, aka Deep Red, sees him working in the latter mode, which we’ve also noted on pieces like the Suono Libero album sleeve, viewable in panel four here. This is also a clear homage to Saul Bass’s famed Vertigo poster. For a look at many more Symeonis, just click his keywords below. Profondo Rosso, by the way, premiered in the U.S. this week in 1976, and is well worth a look for fans of Argento and/or giallo.

Working on a groovy thing.

This poster for Una sull’altra, aka Perversion Story, was painted by Angelo Cesselon, and the film was directed by Lucio Fulci, who would later become one of Italy’s grandmasters of cinematic gore. This flick is eerily similar in plot to Vertigo, complete with the death of the love interest and subsequent reappearance of her double. It’s even set in San Francisco like Vertigo, but the difference is Fulci notches the ’60s psychedelia up to the max, and offers up lots of Austrian actress Marisa Mell’s naked flesh. Mell had starred in the camp classic Diabolik the previous year, and here she is getting groovy again, particularly in one motorcycle striptease that’s probably worth the time spent watching the rest of the film. As a side note, you’ll see Jean Sobieski here, who happens to be Leelee Sobieski’s dad. Una sull’altra opened in Italy today in 1969.

Hitchcock means terror in any language.

We mentioned a while back how frequently we run across foreign language Hitchcock posters, so here are a bunch for your enjoyment, including yet another version of Vertigo. FYI, Il Sipario Strappato is Torn Curtain and Ptáci is The Birds.

Polish poster designer hits the target.

Here we go again with Vertigo. This time we have a brilliant bullseye themed Polish one sheet to add to the amazing French and Italian ones we posted a while back. Again, we can’t choose a favorite. The three are distinct, and awesome.

A sudden recurrence of Vertigo.

We posted the amazing French one sheet for Vertigo last month, and talked briefly about Kim Novak. We also told you Hitchcock posters turn up almost anywhere you look, and in whichever country. Well, today Vertigo premiered again, this time in Italy, and below you see a promotional poster that is completely different from the French version, not just in language of course, but in design as well. We couldn’t choose a favorite if we tried.

The psychological thriller Vertigo couldn’t hold a candle to star Kim Novak’s real life.

Hitchcock really cranked out films. Vertigo was maybe his fiftieth effort. We’d have to count to more than fifteen to be sure, and we’re way too lazy to try. We just know Parisians first saw the flick today in 1958. By this time Hitch was so famous his films screened in virtually every corner of the globe, which means you can find posters of his movies in Russian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese, and so forth. When we stumbled across this nice French art we were reminded what a cool film Vertigo is. It has Jimmy Stewart, a great plot, period fx that still work despite their clunkiness, and a Bernard Hermann score. But really the best thing about this movie is Kim Novak.

After only a year in film, her classic beauty turned heads in the 1955 heroin addiction drama The Man with the Golden Arm, in which she played opposite Frank Sinatra. About two years later, when she was arguably the most famous and desired woman on the planet, she embarked upon an affair with brat-packer Sammy Davis Jr., which set off an avalanche of events that eventually resulted in the Mafia forcing Sammy to marry a Vegas showgirl who happened to be his own race. Novak’s story is too complex to condense into a blurb—it involves gangland bosses, hush money for secret nudes, obsessive suitors, and all the best staples of pulpdom. Through it all she pretty much told the world to screw itself if it didn’t like her exactly the way she was. And she’s still with us at 75. We’ll write more about this amazing person later on.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1985—Matt Munro Dies

English singer Matt Munro, who was one of the most popular entertainers on the international music scene during the 1960s and sang numerous hits, including the James Bond theme “From Russia with Love,” dies from liver cancer at Cromwell Hospital, Kensington, London.

1958—Plane Crash Kills 8 Man U Players

British European Airways Flight 609 crashes attempting to take off from a slush-covered runway at Munich-Riem Airport in Munich, West Germany. On board the plane is the Manchester United football team, along with a number of supporters and journalists. 20 of the 44 people on board die in the crash.

1919—United Artists Is Launched

Actors Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, along with director D.W. Griffith, launch United Artists. Each holds a twenty percent stake, with the remaining percentage held by lawyer William Gibbs McAdoo. The company struggles for years, with Griffith soon dropping out, but eventually more partners are brought in and UA becomes a Hollywood powerhouse.

1958—U.S. Loses H-Bomb

A 7,600 pound nuclear weapon that comes to be known as the Tybee Bomb is lost by the U.S. Air Force off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, near Tybee Island. The bomb was jettisoned to save the aircrew during a practice exercise after the B-47 bomber carrying it collided in midair with an F-86 fighter plane. Following several unsuccessful searches, the bomb was presumed lost, and remains so today.

1906—NYPD Begins Use of Fingerprint ID

NYPD Deputy Commissioner Joseph A. Faurot begins using French police officer Alphonse Bertillon’s fingerprint system to identify suspected criminals. The use of prints for contractual endorsement (as opposed to signatures) had begun in India thirty years earlier, and print usage for police work had been adopted in India, France, Argentina and other countries by 1900, but NYPD usage represented the beginning of complete acceptance of the process in America. To date, of the billions of fingerprints taken, no two have ever been found to be identical.

1974—Patty Hearst Is Kidnapped

In Berkeley, California, an organization calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnaps heiress Patty Hearst. The next time Hearst is seen is in a San Francisco bank, helping to rob it with a machine gun. When she is finally captured her lawyer F. Lee Bailey argues that she had been brainwashed into committing the crime, but she is convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to 35 years imprisonment, a term which is later commuted.

Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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