thu 28/03/2024

Film Gallery: Bill Gold's PosterWorks | reviews, news & interviews

Film Gallery: Bill Gold's PosterWorks

Film Gallery: Bill Gold's PosterWorks

Guns, phones and icons: classic designs that lured moviegoers for 60 years

'Dracula Has Risen from the Grave': 'The poster is not only funny and sexy - it's of a piece with the film's camp Gothic'Reel Art Press

Although there are thematic links between many of the movie posters designed by Bill Gold between 1942 and 2003, especially in the talismanic use of telephones (Dial M for Murder, Klute, The Front Page) and guns (Casablanca, Deliverance, the Dirty Harry films), what’s remarkable is the range of styles he used in creating numerous iconic works. It seems unlikely that the designer responsible for the conventional rendering of James Cagney in patriotic garb in Yankee Doodle Dandy (Gold’s debut) could have conceived the frilly pink collage of My Fair Lady, the blobbed, multicoloured hippie images for Woodstock, and the upside-down nocturnal reflections of Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River (Gold’s last campaign). But he delighted, clearly, in being a visual magpie.

Although there are thematic links between many of the movie posters designed by Bill Gold between 1942 and 2003, especially in the talismanic use of telephones (Dial M for Murder, Klute, The Front Page) and guns (Casablanca, Deliverance, the Dirty Harry films), what’s remarkable is the range of styles he used in creating numerous iconic works. It seems unlikely that the designer responsible for the conventional rendering of James Cagney in patriotic garb in Yankee Doodle Dandy (Gold’s debut) could have conceived the frilly pink collage of My Fair Lady, the blobbed, multicoloured hippie images for Woodstock, and the upside-down nocturnal reflections of Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River (Gold’s last campaign). But he delighted, clearly, in being a visual magpie.

It was Gold who hired Philippe Halsman to photograph Eastwood wielding his Magnum 44 with a wide-angle lens, blowing up the gun to surreal proportions

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