Monday

Film Noir Movie Posters: LIZABETH SCOTT

Sorry I’ve been away for a while — a publisher has approached me about doing a film noir book (Yay blogging!) and it has been taking the lions share of my free time!

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!




Holy smokes I love this!



Bad For Each Other, One-Sheet

The Company She Keeps, One-Sheet. Scott is unrecognizable. O'Keefe looks like Alan Ladd!

The Company She Keeps, Australian Daybill 
Dark City, One-Sheet

Dark City, Italian

French Grande for Dead Reckoning. Scott looks more like Veronica Lake.  
Dead Reckoning, US One Sheet, Style B, one of the truly great film posters
Dead Reckoning, Italian 
Dead Reckoning, Danish
Dead Reckoning, Italian

Dead Reckoning, iconic lobby card

Dead Reckoning, US One Sheet, Style A

Dead Reckoning, French, 1982 re-release

Dead Reckoning, Spanish

I Walk Alone, Half-Sheet

I Walk Alone, Three-Sheet

I Walk Alone, One-Sheet

Pitfall, One-Sheet

Pitfall, Insert

The Racket, One-Sheet

  
Stolen Face, One-Sheet

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, One-Sheet

Too Late for Tears, One-Sheet. Cybil Shepard?

Too Late for Tears, Window Card

Two of a Kind, Half-Sheet

Two of a Kind, One-Sheet

13 comments:

  1. Smashing posters. Congratulations on your book deal.

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  2. "a publisher has approached me about doing a film noir book"
    Hey, congratulations!

    A great set of posters for a great actress. There was, at times, something positively carnivorous about Ms. Scott's smile and the look in her eyes that made her perfect as a femme fatale. And "She does more without a voice than anyone I ever heard" may have been said about Ida Lupino as a torch singer, but it's as least as true about Scott, singing or not.

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    Replies
    1. Thanks Karl!

      This 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.

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  3. My favorite noir actor, nice posting. Looking forward to your book.

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  4. I've just discovered your blog, Mark, and I absolutely love it.
    What 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

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    Replies
    1. 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!

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  5. Cool Stuff, as usual!

    Say, are you on letterboxd.com? Seems you should be but I don't see a link.

    ~Steve

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    1. Thanks Steve — that's new to me, I'll look into it!

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  6. I Adore Lizabeth Scott.

    Thanks So Much!

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  7. Glamorous! 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!

    Ruby Badcoe @ Williams Data Management

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