It’s been nearly four years since the last one of these film poster collections (time flies). I’ve found quite a few interesting posters since then, so I thought I’d do another. There’s no particular theme here. I guess what links these is that they all got my attention in one way or another. These are for films both well-known and obscure, foreign and American. It’s a bit of a grab bag, but they’re all pretty cool.
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The Old Dark House – directed by James Whale, 1932.
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Nosferatu – directed by F.W. Murnau, 1922. Without a doubt the creepiest vampire ever, no top hat and tails for this guy.
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Dracula: Prince of Darkness – directed by Terence Fisher, 1966. I think this is a fan-created poster rather than an official one. Regardless, it’s pretty neat. At right is a Japanese poster for Dracula A.D. 1972, directed by Alan Gibson.
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The Duellists – Ridley Scott, 1977. Scott’s first theatrical feature, which he followed up with Alien two years later.
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Top Hat – directed by Mark Sandrich, 1935. The Thin Man – directed by W.S. Van Dyke, 1934. Side Street – directed by Anthony Mann, 1950. Touch of Evil – directed by Orson Welles, 1958.
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Saigon – directed by Leslie Fenton, 1948. I’d not heard of this film before. Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake in one of several films they co-starred in, another noirish tough-guy story set in the “Paris of the Orient,” as the poster puts it. Seems a little weird, but mostly in hindsight, I suppose.
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Swedish poster for The Bride of Frankenstein, directed by James Whale in 1935. Below that is Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, directed by Terence Fisher in 1969. The pink in this poster seems out of step with the subject matter, but I like the overall in-your-face aspect.
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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – directed by Rouben Mamoulian, 1931. Swedish poster at left, with one I’d never seen before at right. Below that is the kind of theater display for movies we don’t see anymore, followed by a pretty dynamic poster on the bottom.
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Deluge – directed by Felix E. Feist, 1933. In this early disaster movie, a massive earthquake has destroyed the West Coast, followed by huge tidal waves that wipes out much of the East Coast as well. After the impressive destruction of New York City, it becomes an ordinary movie, with a good guy looking for his wife and bad guys who complicate things. But the sequence where New York gets leveled is rather spectacular, even frightening. All the more impressive because this was made in 1933 without CGI or other sophisticated special effects. The miniatures are obvious, but it works.
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Drifting and White Tiger, both directed by Tod Browning in 1923 and both starring Priscilla Dean. At top is art work for a DVD release by Kino Classics ,which I thought was really interesting. The image below that for White Tiger is probably from an industry publication.
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An Italian poster below left for A Letter to Three Wives, written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz in 1949. At right a Japanese poster for The Long Goodbye, directed by Robert Altman in 1973. Below those is a graphic Polish poster for the Japanese film Hara-Kiri, directed by Masaki Kobayashi in 1962.
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Blackmail – Alfred Hitchcock, 1929. This was shot as a silent film, but during production it was decided to add sound, since talkies were becoming all the rage. The film was released in both silent and sound versions because many theaters in England were not technically equipped yet to project sound films. Blackmail has the distinction of being Hitchcock’s last silent and first sound film.
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Adventures of Captain Fabian – directed by William Marshall, 1951. Errol Flynn’s strongest work had been done in the 1930s and ’40s. I think this film is an attempt to maintain his swashbuckling, adventurous image, even though he was somewhat past his prime. The way he’s depicted in this poster supports that notion. Plus, he wrote the screenplay.
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The Mask of Fu Manchu – directed by Charles Brabin, 1932. Hard to top when it comes to promoting racial stereotypes. Myrna Loy is interesting as Fu Manchu’s evil daughter.
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F.P.1 Doesn’t Answer – directed by Karl Hartl, 1932. IMDb describes it as “A spectacular German science fiction film in the tradition of Metropolis (1927) and Gold (1934), F.P. 1 Doesn’t Answer dramatizes the creation of a massive floating airport serving as a way station between four continents… Produced just as the Nazi government was taking control of the German film industry, F.P.1 was writer Kurt Siodmak’s last film before emigrating to England and eventually America, where (as Curt Siodmak) he would write The Wolf Man, Donovan’s Brain, I Walked with a Zombie, and many other classic Hollywood horrors.” It’s interesting that three separate versions were filmed with different casts: German, French, and English. The casts include Peter Lorre, Charles Boyer, and Conrad Veidt in the various versions.
The artwork in the German poster below is quite stunning. Below that at left is the French poster, with the English at right.
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Italian poster for Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950). It’s unusual in that it uses a photograph of co-stars Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame that’s like a portrait instead of more conventional poster artwork. It’s quite intriguing.
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This post is a follow-up to four previous posts, “Movie Poster Art: Foreign Versions” (6/30/14), “Movie Poster Art for Art’s Sake” (12/30/16), “Movie Poster Potpourri” (8/31/17), and “Movie Poster Potpourri – Take 2” (8/20/18).
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That’s all for now. See you at the movies. Stay safe. — Ted Hicks
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Films etc. 
These posters are always fun to see !
What a great selection of dramatic movie posters! If only the films were as good as the ads. The destruction of New York in the passage from “Deluge” is totally wonderful, despite the rudimentary modelling. It displays impressive visual imagination with very, very limited means. Ambitious film-making. Haven’t seen the whole movie, but I will take your word that the post disaster script is weak and conventional. But, frankly, that’s true of most disaster films. The disaster is almost always far more interesting than the characters.
Thanks, Tony. Really glad you liked it. I always have fears that these “collection” pieces will be seen as easy to do and not serious efforts. Truthfully, I usually do them when I don’t have the motivation to do something that takes more work, but I still want to get something up. But then I find that a lot of people, such as yourself, like them, so I feel better. I mean, who doesn’t like looking at movie posters? Also, I particularly like your comments re the destruction of New York sequence in “Deluge.” Weirdly, despite the obvious fakery, something about it feels very real in an unsettling way.