Category Archives: 1930s posters

Starstrucked

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Over the weekend, I got a chance to look at the latest movie poster book to hit the shelves, Starstruck: Vintage Movie Posters From Classic Hollywood.

Written by Ira Resnick, the famed poster collector/owner of the Motion Picture Arts Gallery, this coffeetable book is a dream for fans of pre-1940’s movies. And with an introduction by Martin Scorsese, you know the guy’s legit. Along with colorful reproductions, the book features even more colorful anecdotes of how Resnick scoured the countryside during the 70’s and 80’s and bought most of these priceless collectibles for a song…Ah, dem were the days.

Vargas, Baby!

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Alberto Vargas (1896-1982), the greatest pin-up girl artist of all-time, got his start painting the Ziegfeld girls and then moved onto Hollywood in the 1930’s doing movie star portraits and posters (The Sin of Nora Moran was ranked #2 by Premiere).

In the 1940’s, he created the infamous Vargas Girls for Esquire and then after a legal dispute with the magazine, Playboy resurrected his career in the 1960’s and solidified his legacy forever.

Hoo-ray For Hirschfeld!

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Al Hirschfeld was perhaps the most famous caricaturist in American life, known especially for his light, comical black-and-white portraits of Broadway theatre stars prior to his death in 2003. But during the 1930’s and 40’s, he got his start working on movie posters and did quite a number of them featuring The Marx Bros. His career was so illustrious in fact that in 1996, they even made an Oscar-nominated documentary about him called The Line King!

The Greatest Movie Posters of the Decade(s)

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Another solid series of poster books was published by Graham Marsh and Tony Nourmand, owner of The Reel Poster Gallery in London. Each edition covers the best one-sheets of its respective decade and unearths some real finds.