Here’s a great set of posters featuring the inimitable Emma Matzo of Scranton, Pennsylvania — otherwise known as Lizabeth Scott. At 91 years young, Scott is one of our last remaining links to classic Hollywood.
Her image use in poster design is fascinating. Notice how artists struggled to capture the unique expressiveness of her face, and only seemed to do so successfully when working directly from a photographic source, as in the extraordinary poster for The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. In posters more rooted in illustration, The Company She Keeps, for example, Scott is hardly recognizable as a generic blonde. This is likely the result of her signature deep-set eyes, which are often lost in the film stills and some of the more blandly-lit studio portraits that poster artists were given to work from. Scott was also that rare actress that whose screen persona had a great deal to do with her voice, which poster artists obviously couldn’t zero in on. Enjoy!
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| Holy smokes I love this! |
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| Bad For Each Other, One-Sheet |
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| The Company She Keeps, One-Sheet. Scott is unrecognizable. O'Keefe looks like Alan Ladd! |
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| The Company She Keeps, Australian Daybill |
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| Dark City, One-Sheet |
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| Dark City, Italian |
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| French Grande for Dead Reckoning. Scott looks more like Veronica Lake. |
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| Dead Reckoning, US One Sheet, Style B, one of the truly great film posters |
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| Dead Reckoning, Italian |
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| Dead Reckoning, Danish |
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| Dead Reckoning, Italian |
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| Dead Reckoning, iconic lobby card |
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| Dead Reckoning, US One Sheet, Style A |
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| Dead Reckoning, French, 1982 re-release |
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| Dead Reckoning, Spanish |
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| I Walk Alone, Half-Sheet |
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| I Walk Alone, Three-Sheet |
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| I Walk Alone, One-Sheet |
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| Pitfall, One-Sheet |
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| Pitfall, Insert |
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| The Racket, One-Sheet |
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| Stolen Face, One-Sheet |
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| The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, One-Sheet |
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| Too Late for Tears, One-Sheet. Cybil Shepard? |
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| Too Late for Tears, Window Card |
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| Two of a Kind, Half-Sheet |
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| Two of a Kind, One-Sheet |
Smashing posters. Congratulations on your book deal.
ReplyDeleteThanks Karl!
ReplyDeleteThis guy knows his stuff - I just revisited Jefty's place a few days ago after many years' absence. That quote is equally applicable to Scott as it is Lupino. Great stuff.
My favorite noir actor, nice posting. Looking forward to your book.
ReplyDeleteThanks David!
DeleteI've just discovered your blog, Mark, and I absolutely love it.
ReplyDeleteWhat really caught my eye was that restoration bit from 100 greatest noir posters. If you can spare a few moments, would you mind outlining the techniques generally used? I know my way around Photoshop, so just the broad strokes will do.
Or maybe you can point me to some online source dealing specifically with posters.
Best,
Dominic
Thanks Dominic! I have a fairly low-tech approach. I primarily use the rubber stamp, the spot healing brush, and the patch destination tool to repair the folds, tears, and missing pieces. On certain occasions I'll combine two different source images to get one clean poster. At the end of the process I tweak the colors to get them where I think they were when the poster came off the press. I usually don't spend more than five or ten minutes per image. Outside of my blog though, I've prepared many posters such as these for publication in books, and in those instances I put in a great deal more time, and have to be careful about removing jpeg compression artifacts, which can get a bit complicated and call for very precise selections. Classic movie posters are some of the easiest to fix up, because of the large areas of flat color. Oh, and I do everything on a separate adjustment layer in case I make a mistake!
DeleteCool Stuff, as usual!
ReplyDeleteSay, are you on letterboxd.com? Seems you should be but I don't see a link.
~Steve
Thanks Steve — that's new to me, I'll look into it!
DeleteI Adore Lizabeth Scott.
ReplyDeleteThanks So Much!
Thanks back!
DeleteGlamorous! Lizabeth Scott is a whole lot of a woman! I love that elegant look, which is so common in classic Hollywood. We'll never return back to that level of amazing, but I'll settle for appreciating the vintage beauty of the pictures, which are so expertly preserved. Cheers!
ReplyDeleteRuby Badcoe @ Williams Data Management
Thanks Ruby - I couldn't agree more!
Delete