Reel Art: Great Posters From The Golden Age Of The Silver Screen

This book is fantastic!! Couldn't be happier.Well worth the price I paid for it.

My father-inlaw has it framed and on his wall.

Though it's been out for some years I still look through and enjoy this cornucopia if poster art. Not without a flaw (i'll get to that) so only four stars. I appreciate the thoroughness of the editorial, for instance there is a chapter about printers and distributors of the posters during the twenties, thirties and forties. Chapter four is perhaps the key one as it deals with artists and art directors who were responsible for all these wonderful works. Page 110 has an interesting point: the studios used photographers to take shots of the stars to be used as reference by the artists but by the late thirties this idea started to fade out in favor of using only photos on posters though it took some years for photo posters to overtake paintings.The first chapter suggests that the book covers poster art to the 1950s but there seem to be very few past 1945. The majority are from the thirties and they sold Hollywood round the world. The twenty chapters look at most movie genres each starting from an historical perspective and nicely there are plenty of mono photos to illustrate points in the text. The captions to each poster has technical details (date; studio; art director; artist; dimensions) then some background detail about the movie. Three pages at the back of the book have comprehensive biographies of the artists and there is a short bibliography.The book's printing is first class using a 175 screen on a thickish matt art paper. There is a design flaw, in my opinion, in that so many posters are angled on the page. It seems so unnecessary to use this technique to create visual interest when the posters themselves are fascinating enough, it also means that many posters could have been bigger if they hadn't been angled.Published in 1988 but probably still the best coffee-table book about poster art of the past.

The Hardcover version is LARGE coffee table book (11" x 13"). I picked this book up years ago, interested in the titles and fonts used for posters. (It's so heavy that I've been using it as a paper weight to flatten artwork for the past few years!) I wish the lettering in the posters was more interesting and many of the designs are pretty campy. But I thought I'd add this comment as I see many complaints about the small size, so I gather that is in reference to the paperback (which is marked "tiny" by the way, and is lacking the size).

You ought to see the poster for D. W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" (1915), the movie that President Woodrow Wilson described as "history writ with lightning." It's a heroic poster of a Knight of the Ku Klux Klan on a rearing steed, a burning cross held aloft. The figure wears flowing robes -- shades of David's Napoleon -- underneath which his scarlet cuirasse is emblazoned with a white cross. His helmet -- yes, a helmet, not just a pillowcase with eye holes -- has a threatening foot-long spike atop. Spooky stuff, in more ways than one, yet in 1915 such a poster was a stunning icon, representing a movie whose director believed to be no more than a particularly dramatic but nevertheless realistic historical tale. The Klan rides to the rescue of white women.One of the more impressive features of this thick little book is the stylized ways in which the actor's faces are drawn and painted. Most of the stars in the romances are a bit more, well, pretty than they were on screen. Some are beautified almost beyond recognition. Tyrone Power has the head of a mannequin. If I didn't know it was Mary Astor in "The Maltese Falcon," I wouldn't be able to tell from her poster. Others, monsters and manticores, are appropriate ghoulish. Sometimes the golden green gloom is used for effects other than the macabre. Man, do they bring out those Bette Davis eyes. You know -- the Bette Davis of "Now Voyager" (1942). The actress who murmured the immortal lines, "Oh, Jerry, let's not ask for the moon. We have the stars!"There is an introduction describing the background of studios that are long disappeared -- Vitagraph, Pathe -- before they ALL virtually disappeared, but the text is only about two dozen pages long. It's interesting enough, and the subject is so seldom addressed, that one wishes for more. Nor is there any information to speak of for the individual posters. The artists, one presumes, were anonymous studio hacks but it would be nice to know something about them. Were they just doing a job? Were they Manet manque? Probably just doing a job, but they brought some talent to it. I'd love to know what the late Don Ivan Punchatz would have made of these illustrations.All in all, with almost every stroke of the brush, they violate Samuel Goldwyn's pronouncement about movie posters: "That's the kind of advertising I like. No exaggeration. Just the facts."

Reel Art is like looking at a carpet sampling booklet. The paperback edition that is. Apart from a few none specific notes given a the front of the booklet the information on offer is very limited. Page after page of vintage posters with no text to accompany them makes this flick book an annoying "read". If all you require is visual this is an excellent choice. However, if you thought this book would actually tell you anything about the posters published, think again.Hope you find this helpful. JG

Nice compact book of 1920s-30s film posters in miniature.Delighted with my purchase and the service.

While print quality is small the size of the posters is very small and most are not full page.