The first poster made for a specific film was a cheerful illustration. Marcellin Auzolle drew it for the Lumière brothers’ short comedy L’Arroseur arrosé, which was shown in Paris in December 1895, and it shows an audience laughing at a gardener being sprayed with his own hose. The audience is in the picture. That detail says a lot about what classic movie posters would spend the next eighty years doing: not just showing a film, but promising you a feeling, and showing you other people already having it.
This is a walk through that history, decade by decade, from the 1920s to the 1970s, with the artists and design ideas worth knowing. It is an enthusiast’s overview, not a catalog, and I have stuck to attributions that are well documented.
Before the studios: posters as program listings
The earliest film posters often advertised the show rather than a single picture, listing the short films on a program or simply announcing that moving pictures could be seen inside. As feature-length films took over in the 1910s, posters shifted to illustrated scenes and, increasingly, to stars. Once audiences went to see a particular actor, the actor’s face became the strongest selling point a poster could carry, and it stayed that way for most of the century.
The 1920s: painters, lithographs and the European avant-garde
In the 1920s most American posters were printed by stone lithography, a process that rewarded rich, layered color. Studio art departments and commercial print shops produced vivid painted images of stars, often in romantic or melodramatic poses, with hand-drawn lettering.
Europe went further. In Germany, Heinz Schulz-Neudamm’s poster for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), with its gleaming robot figure against a geometric city, became one of the most reproduced film images ever made. In the Soviet Union, the brothers Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg built constructivist posters out of photomontage, sharp angles and bold type; their design for Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is still taught in design schools. These posters treated cinema as modern art, and their influence came back to Hollywood a generation later.
The 1930s: the studio system takes over
By the 1930s each major studio ran its own advertising machine, with art directors overseeing whole campaigns. At Universal, art director Karoly Grosz oversaw the posters for the studio’s horror cycle, including Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931) and The Mummy (1932), designs I look at more closely in old horror movie posters.
The house style of the decade was glamour. Posters for musicals, comedies and romances featured large painted portraits of stars, airbrushed skin, Art Deco lettering and plenty of white space. Printing was moving from stone lithography toward faster offset methods, but the look stayed painterly. The formats were standardized too: the one-sheet, half-sheet, insert, window card and lobby card set became the expected package for a release, a system I explain in movie poster sizes.
The 1940s: wartime, noir and Bill Gold
The 1940s brought National Screen Service into poster distribution for the major studios, and with it a more standardized flow of paper to theaters. Design-wise, the decade is best remembered for two things: the star-driven romantic poster and the shadowy crime poster.
Bill Gold, who started at Warner Bros. in this period, designed the poster for Casablanca (1942), and he would go on to one of the longest careers in the business. Crime films and what critics later called film noir produced posters full of guns, cigarette smoke and women drawn in dramatic light, often more lurid than the films themselves. If you like that atmosphere on screen, my piece on film noir lighting covers how it was achieved.
The 1950s: modernism versus the monster movie
The 1950s split poster design in two directions at once.
On one side was graphic modernism. Saul Bass’s work for Otto Preminger, starting with Carmen Jones (1954) and especially The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), replaced the painted star portrait with a single bold symbol, flat color and cut-paper shapes. His posters for Vertigo (1958) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959) showed that a film could be sold with an idea rather than a face.
On the other side was the exploitation poster: giant creatures, screaming women and impossible scale. Reynold Brown painted some of the best-known examples, including Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958). These posters promised far more spectacle than the low budgets delivered, which is a large part of their charm now.
Meanwhile in Poland, a group of artists working on posters for foreign and domestic films developed what became known as the Polish poster school. Designers such as Henryk Tomaszewski and Jan Lenica ignored the studio key art entirely and made their own interpretive, often surreal images. A Polish poster for an American western can look like a gallery print.
The 1960s: illustrators as stars
In the 1960s a handful of commercial illustrators became famous in their own right. Robert McGinnis painted the elegant, long-limbed figure on the poster for Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and went on to work on several James Bond campaigns. Bob Peak brought a loose, vivid painting style to My Fair Lady (1964) and Camelot (1967), and helped set the look of the big-budget roadshow musical.
The decade also saw more photography and more graphic experimentation, as studios competed with television and with an audience that was getting younger. Some posters leaned on bold type and a single photograph; others borrowed the style of pop art and magazine illustration.
The 1970s: the painted blockbuster
The 1970s were, for many people, the last great decade of the painted movie poster. Richard Amsel’s design for The Sting (1973) paid homage to the illustration style of J.C. Leyendecker, matching the film’s 1930s setting. Bill Gold produced the stark, photographic poster for A Clockwork Orange (1971) and the famous streetlight image for The Exorcist (1973). Roger Kastel’s painting for Jaws (1975), with a swimmer above and an enormous shark rising beneath, became one of the defining images of the blockbuster era. Bob Peak closed the decade with Apocalypse Now (1979).
From the 1980s onward, as studios took poster production back from National Screen Service and marketing departments grew, photographic key art became the norm, and the painted poster gradually became a specialty rather than the standard.
The pressbook: how one design became a whole campaign
One reason a classic campaign looks so consistent is the pressbook, sometimes called a campaign book. Studios sent these booklets to exhibitors for each release. They showed every poster format available, the newspaper ad layouts in several column widths, publicity stories ready to run in the local paper and, in many cases, suggestions for lobby stunts and promotional tie-ins. A small-town manager could plan an entire campaign from it.
That system is why the same central image tends to turn up on the one-sheet, the insert, the newspaper ad and the title lobby card, each time cropped and rearranged for a new shape. It is also why pressbooks are useful to film historians today: they record what a studio thought was the selling point of a film at the moment of release.
Classic movie posters at a glance
| Decade | Dominant look | Names and examples |
|---|---|---|
| 1920s | Painted lithographs; European avant-garde | Schulz-Neudamm, Metropolis; the Stenberg brothers |
| 1930s | Studio glamour, Art Deco lettering | Karoly Grosz at Universal |
| 1940s | Star romance and shadowy crime | Bill Gold, Casablanca |
| 1950s | Modernist symbols vs. exploitation art | Saul Bass; Reynold Brown; the Polish school |
| 1960s | Celebrity illustrators | Robert McGinnis; Bob Peak |
| 1970s | The painted blockbuster | Richard Amsel; Roger Kastel; Bill Gold |
How to look at a classic poster
Whether you see posters in a museum show, a book or a repertory cinema’s hallway, a few questions make them more interesting:
- Who is the poster selling? The star, the director, the genre or the idea? The answer changes by decade.
- Is it painted, photographed or designed? Each tells you something about the studio’s budget and confidence.
- What does it promise that the film does not deliver? Exploitation posters are the extreme case, but almost every poster exaggerates.
- Which country is it from? British quads, Italian sheets, Polish posters and Japanese B2s often use completely different artwork for the same film.
Classic movie posters were made to be thrown away after a few weeks on a wall. That so many are now studied as design history is a fine irony, and a good reason to look at them closely.
Where to go next
For the designer who changed the look of the 1950s, read Saul Bass and title design. For the smaller scene cards that hung inside theaters, start with what are lobby cards.
