Martin Scorsese's 10 Essential Movie Posters

Movie posters may be designed to push tickets. But on a deeper level they’re selling something larger: romance and mystery. Martin Scorsese makes that case here, in an exclusive excerpt from the new coffee-table book Starstruck: Vintage Movie Posters from Classic Hollywood.

For me, and anyone who grew up before a certain time—sometime in the 1980s I’d say—posters were a key part of the moviegoing experience. You’d walk through the lobby, and you’d look at the poster, usually accompanied by lobby cards and often by stills and promotional language, of the film you were about to see, and the one that was coming next. You’d hold and absorb the image in your mind’s eye. Part of the excitement then was in watching the actual film and comparing it with the possible or likely film you’d conjured up during the few seconds you’d looked at the poster.

The poster was meant to embody the film, but you always knew it was somehow outside the film, too. It had to give you some sense of the picture, but it also carried its own mystery and romance. That’s why there are people like Ira Resnick, and myself, who have devoted a lot of time and money to building our own collections of movie posters. That’s what this glorious book is all about.

For instance, take the poster for Gilda. It’s one of the most iconic images in American movies: Rita Hayworth standing in a long, form-fitting, strapless blue satin dress, a wrap dangling from one hand and a lit cigarette held in the other, her head cocked back in something like disdain, carelessness, and maybe superiority. It’s her character, it’s the movie, but it’s also something else. She’s standing against a dark background, on a wash of white and purplish blue over a lighter blue. In other words, she’s a goddess standing on a cloud. There’s some standard promotional language ("There NEVER was a woman like Gilda!") positioned over her head in an arc, and the while letters (only "Gilda!" is red) suggest stars. The imagery is in line with the general idea of movie star, but it’s beyond that. It suggests a kind of enchanted celestial life, far above us. It was entrancing when I was a kid, and it’s just as entrancing now. And it’s quite distinct from the movie. Now, the poster for Gilda seems wonderfully complementary to the movie Gilda.


Take the three-sheet for My Darling Clementine—a low-angle medium shot of Henry Fonda pointing his pistol positioned against a close-up of Victor Mature and Linda Darnell cheek to cheek. Fonda stands on a dark ridge against the suggestion of a sunrise, and the ridge is crossed with a brown-wash suggesting the desert. Mature and Darnell are set against a delicate range of colors, so that the yellow of Fonda’s sunrise is also the yellow of the otherworldly backdrop. It’s not quite the movie—the poster is much more garish—but it’s exciting on its own because it has that odd, floating quality, like an emanation from a higher world.

Posters carry the DNA of their era, and that’s also exciting. The art deco blindfolded, disembodied men’s heads forming a triangle at the top of Stroheim’s Blind Husbands poster is the 1920s. The iconic image of James Dean in a cowboy hat and jeans stretched out on a wagon against a big sky and a western mansion in the distance, from Giant, is the 1950s. You look, and you either remember what it was like to be alive then, or you imagine what it must have been like. The poster for Spitfire—a painting of Katharine Hepburn sitting on top of a mountain, leaning back on her hands and staring up at the heavens, the shafts of sunlight breaking into the title—would be unthinkable now, or in the 1920s or ’50s. It could only have come from the early ’30s. Design changes, techniques and styles change, the sense of romance changes, along with a million other subtler, more fleeting common notions, practices, and shared emotions—and you’re confronted with an image that is speaking directly of, and from, its time. And it’s often speaking beautifully and gracefully, because that’s the visual language of movie posters at their best.

As I said, I share Ira Resnick’s passion for collecting movie posters. And you may very well begin to share that passion after you look through Starstruck and are caught by stunning reproductions of, for example, a lobby card for Orphans of the Storm, a German poster for Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl, a window card for Bringing Up Baby, or stunning posters for pictures you may not even know of like Private Detective 62 with William Powell or Daphne and the Pirate with Lillian Gish.

Welcome to the bewitching otherworld of the movie poster.

From Starstruck: Vintage Movie Posters from Classic Hollywood, by Ira M. Resnick, published by Abbeville Press.