| Vintage Pulp | Aug 3 2020 |
Robert Taylor plays the bad cop blues.
Here you see a nice blue promo poster for Sur la trace du crime, better known as Rogue Cop, with Robert Taylor, George Raft, and Janet Leigh. We talked about this last year. Shorter version: decent but not great. It opened in France yesterday in 1955.
| Vintage Pulp | Jul 29 2020 |
Mansfield and her crew try to steal a million.
This fantastic Belgian poster with lettering in French and Dutch was made for the 1957 film noir L'Ange des mauvais garçons, better known as The Burglar. Well, better known is relative. The movie is somewhat obscure but it shouldn't be—it's a film noir clinic, and this great promo, which was made for its run at the Ciné Capitole in Antwerp, befits such an artful movie. It's unsigned, so the creator will have to remain unrecognized for now. Conversely, we think the movie will garner more recognition as time passes. Jayne Mansfield co-stars but don't get your hopes up—she doesn't wear a black jumpsuit. Not even close. You can read more about the movie here.
BelgiumAntwerpL'Ange des mauvais garçonsThe BurglarDan DuryeaJayne Mansfieldposter artcinemafilm noir
| Vintage Pulp | Jun 13 2020 |
Bogart crime drama misses the bullseye but still scores a few points.
For us there's no such thing as a bad Bogart vehicle. Every movie we've seen from him in a starring role is at least decent. Above is a poster for The Big Shot, in which he co-starred with Irene Manning. Consensus is it's not one of his best. Bogart plays a career criminal who finds it incredibly difficult to go straight, and whose best efforts are confounded when he gets tangled up in an armored car robbery. We know from the beginning it went bad because the story is told in flashback as Bogie languishes in a hospital bed. Exactly how it went wrong is where the movie attempts to deliver the thrills. Despite its status as second tier Bogart, it has a couple of memorable sequences. The first is a prison break, and the second is a chase on icy roads as Bogart's car is pursued by motorcycle cops. This was Bogart's last gangster role for a while, because he was on the verge of becoming the cinematic leading man we all know and love. He had already proved all he needed to in gangster parts, and was thrilled to leave them behind. But this film showed that he would still need the help of a compelling story, an excellent script, and solid co-stars. From this point forward, he usually got the best of all those. The Big Shot premiered today in 1942.
Humphrey, don't be rude. Look at me when I talk to you.
Turn around and look at me, Irene. I said— Oh, you're doing me, aren't you? Nice.
You've got that Bogart thing pretty much perfected, Irene. Irene? 
| Femmes Fatales | Jun 13 2020 |
Susan comes down with a case of the bends.
Above, an interesting promo image of U.S. actress Susan Harrison, known for her role as Susie Hunsecker in the iconic film noir Sweet Smell of Success, seen here putting her sacroiliac through its paces with a serpentine “S” posture we suspect is harder to strike than it looks. But that's what talent is for—making hard stuff look easy. The photo was made when Harrison was filming 1960's Key Witness. We haven't seen Sweet Smell of Success, but we have a copy, and its premiere date is this month, so we'll see if we can fit it into the queue and report back. Meanwhile Harrison proves below that she can make other symbols with her body—“Я” for example, which looks like a meaningless backwards “R” but which in actuality is, “I am” in Cyrillic. We have it on good authority that she finished the thought with the Cyrillic for “flexible”—Гибкий. We'll try to track down that shot for you.
| Vintage Pulp | May 25 2020 |
Glenn Ford gets the picture and it isn't pretty.
This poster for the film noir Framed, which premiered in the U.S. today in 1947, is a bit different in style from what you'd normally see during the 1940s. It was a low budget movie, so we imagine this was the low budget solution to promo art. It's reasonably effective, enough so that we decided to watch the movie, and the premise is that pretty boy Glenn Ford is a down-on-his-luck job seeker who's been unwittingly selected by a couple of shady characters to take the fall for a bank embezzlement. We didn't give anything away there. Viewers know pretty much right away Ford is being set up, who's doing it, and why. It's the complications that make the movie, and those accumulate rather quickly. If being framed is defined as to be on the hook for a crime you didn't commit, then there's more than one framee in this film, which is where clever scripting comes in to rescue a bottom drawer budget. In the end you get a nice b-noir with a title that takes on more significance than you'd at first assume. We recommend it highly.
| Femmes Fatales | May 20 2020 |
Rita Hayworth does tall, dark, and treacherous.
We've done a lot on Gilda, but it's one of our favorite movies of the 1940s, and we'd be remiss if we didn't show you this beautiful promo image, basically the best of the lot from this flick. Gilda had everything—an exotic Argentine location (shot on a backlot), a story of danger (done many times before), and a tough, cynical leading man (nothing new for the time period). So then, what made Gilda great, if it was so derivative? Two things—Hayworth, playing a jaded and suspicious femme fatale; and a good script that skirted that bounds of what was allowable in terms of expressing feminine sexual liberation. Co-star Glenn Ford had perfect chemistry with Hayworth, too, which counts for something, but any man would have that. No, it's Rita's show. And though she didn't live forever, Gilda will. Or at least, it'll live as long as humans watch anything that can be classified as cinema.
| Vintage Pulp | May 9 2020 |
High quality poster art for a high quality film noir.
As far as posters go for the seminal Gene Tierney film noir Laura, this, we think, is the best of the lot. It's the West German promo, a real work of art, signed, but illegibly. We scoured the internet for hours for clues to the creator of this, but with no luck, so put it in the unknown file. Laura premiered in the U.S. in 1944, and reached West Germany today in 1947.
| Hollywoodland | Vintage Pulp | May 7 2020 |
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night can stay her from the swift completion of her appointed seduction.
Above is a trolley card for the classic Lana Turner/John Garfield film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice, which according to the text, opened at the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles today in 1946. What's a trolley card? Pretty much self-explanatory, that. But you don't see many surviving examples, so this is a real treasure. The opening date represents new info. All the websites we checked said the movie opened in L.A. May 9. Maybe the managers of the Egyptian had connections at MGM. Awesome connections, we guess, to have helped them beat the rest of town by two full days. With that kind of juice, it's safe to assume they only had to ring once at the studio gates. We worked in the L.A. film industry. Relationships are everything. Or maybe the movie actually opened today, and the internet is wrong. Wouldn't be the first time. Not that we're trying to sound superior. We've made errors more than once. Interestingly, we were able to locate a vintage photo of the Egyptian with its marquee advertising Postman. It's a great movie. Nobody needs us to tell them that, but we did anyway, at this link.
Los AngelesMetro-Goldwyn-MayerThe Postman Always Rings TwiceJohn GarfieldLana Turnerposter artcinemafilm noir
| Vintage Pulp | May 3 2020 |
If you were framed for murder you'd be pissed too.
These posters for They Made Me a Killer are about as nice as you'll find from the mid-century period. They're both framable classics, so it may come as a surprise to know the film is a bottom budget b-noir, only sixty-four minutes long, and streamlined in plot. Basically, Robert Lowery, who soups up cars for a living, gets suckered by a femme fatale into driving getaway for a bank robbery. He's literally hijacked. Bank guards die, and a witness is shot. When Lowery is eventually left behind, the cops pick him up and he tries to explain that he's a patsy, but they don't believe him. This leads to an astonishing sequence. Lowery convinces the cops to take him to the hospital, where the fact that he had nothing to do with the robbery can be confirmed by a critically wounded witness. But the witness is barely hanging on and is unable to speak at all. Lowery decides to escape and upends the hospital bed onto the cops‚ critically injured occupant and all. He hadn't killed the bank guards, but the guy in the hospital bed surely couldn't have survived being dumped on the floor. It's weird and kind of funny, but the scene does let us know the hero's motivations for finding the robbers may not be as simple as merely clearing his name. You have time to kill? This lightweight thriller is fine. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1946.
They Made Me a KillerRobert LoweryBarbara BrittonLola Laneposter artcinemamovie reviewfilm noirmovie review
| Hollywoodland | Apr 2 2020 |
Shit. I knew moving up to the behemoth division was a bad idea.
Above is a promo image made of Robert Ryan when he was starring in the gritty boxing noir The Set-Up. There's good news and bad news for Ryan here. The bad news is he's losing. The good news is he'll survive because his opponent only kills to eat. The film premiered today in 1949, and you can read what we wrote about it and see more promo images here.
