Attack of the 50 Foot Woman - 1958

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman Art Print
23.625 in. x 31.5 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com
Framed   Mounted


"Attack of the 50 Foot Woman," the 1958 cult classic, is everything that the 1957 science fiction film "The Incredible Shrinking Man" is not. It is about a woman instead of a man, growing bigger instead of shrinking, vengeance instead of philosophy, and bad instead of good. However, I come down on the side of those that think this film is gloriously bad and therefore an enjoyable camp romp.

Heiress Nancy Archer (Allison Hayes) is driving around in the California desert on Route 66 when a satellite crashes to earth and she has an encounter with a giant. Nancy heads back to town and tells everyone what happened, but the police just think she has been off on one of her drinking binges again (Nancy has been institutionalized in the past, you see). As for her husband, Harry (William Hudson), he is too busy paying attention to that cheap tramp Honey Parker (Yvette Vickers). Only now Harry sees his big chance to have Nancy declared mentally incompetent so he can get her $50 million inheritance and that big diamond she wears on the cheap chain around her neck. Fortunately, Nancy is again abducted by the giant alien and when she comes back to town she is 50-feet tall and ready to go on the attack with Harry her prime target.

The sequence as Nancy slowly but surely trashes the town as she tracks down Harry redeems the rest of the film, even if the same shot shows up repeatedly (albeit sometimes backwards). The sight of Allison Hayes in her cloth bikini is as memorable an image as you will find in science fiction films from the Fifties, right up there with Gort's appearance in "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Up to that point the film belongs to Yvette Vickers, who attains a level of performance as a bad girl usually reserved for your more traditional exploitation films from this period.

"Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" can be read as a proto-feminist film, with Nancy's crashing through the roof of her house being viewed as a metaphor for breaking the boundaries of repression which limited the growth of women in the real world. But where is the fun in that? Harry done Nancy wrong and fate has given Nancy the opportunity to engage in payback. This movie was made in 1993 with Darryl Hannah and while the special effects were vastly improved, the net gain was just not as enjoyable as the original romp in the desert, which remains a touchstone for fans of bad science fiction films.

The Letter - 1940

The Letter, Bette Davis on Midget Window Card, 1941 Giclee Print
9 in. x 12 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com
Framed   Mounted


A classic melodramatic film noir of murder and deceit, effectively directed by William Wyler. The screenplay by Howard Koch was based on W. Somerset Maugham's mid-1920s London stage play (with Gladys Cooper in the lead role). Then, it was a Broadway play that opened in 1927 (with Katharine Cornell), followed by Paramount Studios' talkie of the same name in 1929 with Academy-Award nominated Jeanne Eagels (in her sound film debut) as the female protagonist. [It was the first full-length feature made at Paramount's Long Island studio.]

The film's startling opening scene occurs on a moonlight night on the grounds of a Malaysian rubber plantation. The wife of the plantation owner, Leslie Crosbie (Davis) trails after Geoffrey Hammond (Newell) as he staggers from the bungalow's porch, and pumps bullets into his body. She claims to her faithful, long-suffering husband Robert (Marshall) that Hammond, an old family friend, took advantage of her and that she acted in self-defense, but when lawyer Howard Joyce (Stephenson) is hired to defend her, a letter surfaces and reveals her real motives.

One of the trailers for the film provocatively asked: "What are the forbidden secrets in the letter? What is the strange spell that made this woman defy the unwritten law of the Orient?" Hammond's Eurasian widow (Sondergaard) uses the letter as part of a $10,000 blackmail scheme, demands a personal apology, and seeks the ultimate revenge. This great Bette Davis/Warner Bros. picture was positioned between the star's All This and Heaven Too (1940) and The Great Lie (1941).

Dark Victory - 1939

Dark Victory, Bette Davis, 1939 Giclee Print
9 in. x 12 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com
Framed   Mounted


Warner Bros. studios' sentimental, tragic and moving melodrama (a "weepie" or "woman's picture") - made in Hollywood's most famous and competitive year. The adult drama contains an electrifying, compelling, tour de force, tear-jerking performance from its major star -- Bette Davis. It was a bit of a risk for the movie studio to make and publicize an intense film about a terminally-ill patient with "prognosis negative." The protagonist is a young socialite-heiress named Judith Traherne (Davis), who suffers from a brain tumor and ultimately falls in love with her supportive and dedicated doctor Frederick Steele (Brent). In the midst of her deadly illness, she comforts her best friend Ann King (Fitzgerald), and courageously meets her fate when her eyesight dims. She climbs her stairs for the last time - accompanied by Max Steiner's swelling score in the film's finale.

Pinocchio - 1940

Pinocchio and Jiminy - Friendly Fun Framed Art Print
12.5 in. x 15.5 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com


The second full-length animated feature classic from Walt Disney Studios - about a wooden puppet who yearns to be a real boy. Based on a story written by Carlo Collodi in the 1800's. Beautifully drawn with technically-superior animation and memorable characterizations - Geppetto the kindly woodcarver, Figaro the cat, Cleo the goldfish, Stromboli the puppeteer, Monstro the whale, the Blue Fairy, Lampwick - and obviously Jiminy Cricket and Pinocchio. The carver's creation - a puppet boy, is turned into a flesh-and-blood boy, with the stipulation that he must be brave, unselfish, and learn right from wrong in order to earn real life. The boy is accompanied by his conscience, Jiminy Cricket for his adventures. Pinocchio is tempted by a conniving fox J. Worthington Foulfellow, exploited by a puppet master Stromboli, and sent to Pleasure Island (where naughty boys are turned into donkeys) for truly terrifying experiences and a daring rescue from the belly of a monstrous whale. Includes Jiminy Cricket singing the future Disney theme song "When You Wish Upon a Star."

Mutiny on the Bounty - 1935

Mutiny on the Bounty, Center from Left, Movita, Clark Gable, Charles Laughton, 1935 Giclee Print
12 in. x 9 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com
Mounted


The oft-filmed (1962 and 1984), classic adventure tale of the famous, historical 1788 British naval vessel the HMS Bounty and its mutiny on the high seas. Based on Nordhoff and Hall's novel. Partially filmed on location in Tahiti. One of MGM's glossiest and biggest box-office successes. On a journey from Portsmouth, England to Tahiti to procure breadfruit trees, the crew suffers under the merciless chastisements of the tyrannically-cruel and mean Captain William Bligh (Laughton). After an idyllic interlude on the exotic island, where the crew romances native women, the crew on the return voyage rebels under the courageous, noble leadership of First Mate Fletcher Christian (Gable) following the Captain's brutal insistence that the ship's elderly doctor Bacchus (Digges) come topside to witness the flogging of five crew members. The despicable Captain is set adrift in an open lifeboat with no sail, compass or food, for an amazing 4,000 mile voyage to safety. In the final scene, Roger Byam (Tone) is brought to trial.

Metropolis - 1927

Metropolis, 1928 Framed Art Print
20.375 in. x 26.375 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com


A stylized, visually-compelling, melodramatic silent film set in the 21st century city of Metropolis - Lang's German Expressionistic masterpiece helped develop the science-fiction genre. The luxurious, futuristic city of skyscrapers and bridges is stratified and divided into an upper, elite, privileged class and a subterranean, nameless, oppressed, ant-like worker / slave class. Freder (Frohlich), the young son of a ruling, aristocratic capitalist Master Joh Fredersen (Abel), discovers the miserable life of the proletariat when he notices a beautiful young woman Maria (Helm) with a group of worker children and pursues her into the squalid, labyrinthine underground slums. The wistful, Christ-like young woman urges her comrades to peacefully await their salvation. After discovering their meeting, Freder's father instructs mad scientist Rotwang (Klein-Rogge) to create an evil robotic Maria look-alike that will manipulate the workers, preach rebellion, and cause their elimination. The false Maria goes beserk and incites the workers to revolt, causing a cataclysmic flood. Freder and the real rescued Maria lead the worker children out of danger, and Joh Fredersen is convinced to reconcile with the workers - Capital and Labor united in Love.

The Lost Weekend - 1944

The Lost Weekend Masterprint
12 in. x 16 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com
Framed   Mounted


Based on Charles Jackson's 1944 novel by co-screenwriters Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder and filmed in NYC. A classic, melodramatic, realistically-grim and uncompromising "social-problem" film of the 1940s, about the controversial subject of alcoholism, told partially in flashback. Rather than join his brother Wick (Terry) on a weekend outing to the country, talented New York aspiring novel writer Don Birnam (Milland) - a chronic alcoholic with writer's block - spends a 'lost weekend' on a wild, self-destructive drinking binge. Eluding his persistently supportive girlfriend Helen St. James (Wyman), he desperately trudges down Third Avenue on Yom Kippur attempting to find an open pawnshop to hock his own typewriter for another drink. In Bellevue Hospital's alcohol detoxification ward, he awakens to shrieking inmates suffering the DT's, and in his apartment experiences hallucinations of a mouse attacked by a bat. He narrowly avoids committing suicide in the 'optimistic' ending.

The Killers - 1946

The Killers, Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, 1946 Giclee Print
12 in. x 9 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com
Mounted


A classic, definitive film noir, from a short story by Ernest Hemingway, told in eleven taut flashbacks after a bravura opening murder sequence. Two hit men Al (McGraw) and Max (Conrad) enter a greasy-spoon diner in Brentwood New Jersey, asking the manager about Ole 'Swede' Andersen (Lancaster, in his film debut) - a gas station attendant. The doomed 'Swede' (an ex-boxer), who has been hiding in town under an alias for six years, is warned in a nearby boardinghouse. Indifferent, he expects their arrival and calmly, passively awaits their deadly approach. Insurance investigator Jim Reardon (O'Brien) pieces together and unravels the plot and reconstructs the life of the victim through interviews and detective work. He discovers a complex tale of crime and treacherous betrayal - all revolving around a beautifully-glamorous, mysterious, double-crossing femme fatale Kitty Collins (Gardner) - who sings "The More I Know of Love."

GoodFellas - 1990

Good Fellas Poster
24 in. x 36 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com
Framed   Mounted


GoodFellas (1990) is director Martin Scorsese's stylistic masterpiece - a follow-up film to his own Mean Streets (1973), released in the year of Francis Ford Coppola's third installment of his gangster epic - The Godfather, Part III (1990). It is a nitty-gritty, unflinching treatment of a true mobster story about three violent "wiseguys" [Mafia slang for 'gangsters'], enhanced by the Italian-American director's own experience of his upbringing in Little Italy.

The film's factual, semi-documentary account was adapted from both Nicholas Pileggi's and Martin Scorsese's screenplay - based upon Pileggi's 1985 non-fictional book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family. Film posters were subtitled: "Three Decades of Life in the Mafia." The real-life story concerned a low-level, marginalized gangster (or 'foot-soldier') of mixed ethnic roots (half-Irish, half-Sicilian) - Henry Hill, who ultimately broke the gangster's code of 'never ratting on your friends', and turned informant for the FBI and entered the Federal Witness Protection Program to save his life by disappearing from view.

The fast-moving, energizing, episodic story, with plentiful profanity (the F-word is repeatedly spoken by Joe Pesci's character), forceful editorial cuts and visuals, shifting points of view, and characters speaking directly to the camera, is told with voice-over narrative commentary by Henry Hill (Ray Liotta). It includes about thirty years in his life, from his teen years as a Brooklyn Irish neighborhood kid to maturity as an adult gangster, covering the years from the 1950s to the drug-saturated 1970s when married to wife Karen (Lorraine Bracco). The additional voice-over of his wife's point-of-view provides even further insight into the all-encompassing culture and lure of life within the 'family.' Freeze frames sprinkled through the film accentuate the indelible, impressionable moments in Henry's experiences.

Frankenstein - 1931

Frankenstein 1931 Limited Edition
27 in. x 41 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com
Framed


The classic horror film, adapted from Mary Shelley's famous 1818 novel, from the great director James Whale. With his hunchbacked, twitchy assistant Fritz (Frye), fanatical mad scientist Dr. Frankenstein (Clive) steals bodies from graves to assemble a creature - a mute, lumbering, flat-headed and browed Monster (Karloff) with visible facial scars, bolts in his neck and sunken eyes. Frankenstein shouts: "It's alive! Alive!" during the fantastic creation scene in his castle, when the hulking body comes alive with electricity harnassed from lightning. The revived, childlike brute with a criminal brain is misunderstood, and while playfully tossing flowers into a lake heaves in an innocent eight-year-old girl - who he imagines as another flower - to her drowning death.

Cool Hand Luke - 1967

Cool Hand Luke Framed Art Print
16 in. x 22 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com


Based on Donn Pearce's novel and one of the great prison-chain-gang films. A spirited, irreverent, social misfit Luke (Newman) is arrested for destroying parking meters and imprisoned in a tough Southern prison farm, commanded by a sadistic, prison officer Captain (Martin). After boxing with the chain-gang boss Dragline (Kennedy), he eventually becomes a hero to his fellow inmates, earning the title "Cool Hand Luke" because his will cannot be broken. A visit by Luke's dying mother (Van Fleet) reveals facts about his past. The stubborn, unruly and independent rebel refuses to submit and continually and cooly defies the authorities with repeated escape attempts. As the inmates start worshipping him as a folk hero, he risks everything in order to live up to their expectations, and is sacrificed in the tragic climax. With the memorable line of dialogue: "What we have here is failure to communicate," and the classic egg-eating scene.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind - 1977

Close Encounters of the Third Kind Framed Art Print
16 in. x 22 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com


A science-fiction epic and adventure story about the mysteries of UFO and extra-terrestrial appearances. A Middle-American from Indiana Roy Neary (Dreyfuss), a utilities lineman, is confronted by a UFO on a deserted road at night as he investigates a power outage - a near-religious, life-transforming experience. Afterwards, he becomes obsessed with unexplained, mountainous shapes, and five musical notes. By piecing together clues, he is ultimately led to a rendezvous on Devils Tower in Wyoming with Jillian (Dillon), a mother whose young boy Barry (Guffey) was kidnapped by the aliens. There in the exhilarating climax, they witness an arriving spacecraft, the dazzling mother-ship, greeted by a top-secret scientific establishment led by Claude Lacombe (Truffaut).

Brief Encounter - 1946

Based on a Noel Coward play - a poignant, restrained British melodramatic romance, about two married strangers, Dr. Alec Harvey (Howard) and housewife Laura Jesson (Johnson), who have a chance meeting one Thursday on the platform of a train station. Their casual friendship soon turns into a romantic relationship and they fall in love. The romanticism of the film is enhanced by Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 musical score. Academy Award Nominations: 3, including Best Director, Best Actress--Celia Johnson, Best Screenplay.

The Asphalt Jungle - 1950

The Asphalt Jungle Poster
26.75 in. x 38.625 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com
Framed   Mounted


A classic noirish thriller, an adaptation based on a novel by W. R. Burnett, about a mastermind, aging, ex-convict criminal Doc (Jaffe), who comes out of retirement (prison) for one last jewel robbery with an assemblage of underworld characters - Kentucky horse-farm loving Dix Handley (Hayden) with tough-girlfriend Doll (Hagen), and sleazy lawyer partner Alonzo Emmerich (Calhern) who plans to fence the jewels to support his expensive habits (e.g., an affair with seductive mistress Monroe - in a cameo role). The heist unravels quickly and everything falls apart when an alarm accidentally sounds and the safecracker is mortally wounded by a stray bullet. While Emmerich commits suicide, and others are either jailed or wounded, Doc's creepy voyeurism for a young girl dooms him during his escape. Dix reaches his childhood Kentucky farm but expires in a field surrounded by horses. Academy Award Nominations: 4, including Best Supporting Actor--Sam Jaffe, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best B/W Cinematography.

The Wizard of Oz - 1939

Wizard of Oz, Judy Garland, 1939 Giclee Print
9 in. x 12 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com
Framed   Mounted


The Wizard of Oz (1939) is everybody's cherished favorite, perennial fantasy film musical from MGM during its golden years. For many seasons, it was featured regularly on network TV as a prime time event (its first two showings were on CBS television on November 3, 1956 and in December, 1959) and then annually for Thanksgiving, Christmas and/or Easter time. It soon became a classic institution, and a rite of passage for everyone, and probably has been seen by more people than any other motion picture over multiple decades. Initially, however, the film was not commercially successful (at $3 million), but it was critically acclaimed.

All of its images (the Yellow Brick Road, the Kansas twister), characters (e.g., Auntie Em, Toto, Dorothy, the Wicked Witch), dialogue (e.g., "Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!", "We're not in Kansas anymore," "Follow the Yellow Brick Road," or the film's final line: "There's no place like home"), and music ("Over the Rainbow") have become indelibly remembered, and the classic film has been honored with dozens of books, TV shows (such as HBO's dramatic prison series Oz), references in other films, and even by pop groups (singer Elton John with his Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road album, or Pink Floyd's 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon).

The film's plot is easily condensed: lonely and sad Kansas farmgirl Dorothy dreams of a better place, without torment against her dog Toto from a hateful neighbor spinster, so she plans to run away. During a fierce tornado, she is struck on the head and transported to a land 'beyond the rainbow' where she meets magical characters from her Kansas life transformed within her unconscious dream state. After travels down a Yellow Brick Road to the Land of Oz, and the defeat of the Wicked Witch of the West, Dorothy and her friends are rewarded by the Wizard of Oz with their hearts' desires - and Dorothy is enabled to return home to Kansas.

Vertigo - 1958

Vertigo Framed Poster
Bass, Saul
26 in. x 37 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com


Vertigo (1958) is one of Alfred Hitchcock's most powerful, deep, and stunningly beautiful films (in widescreen 70 mm VistaVision) - it is a film noir that functions on multiple levels. At the time of the film's release, it was not a box-office hit, but has since been regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. The work is a mesmerizing romantic suspense/thriller about a macabre, doomed romance - a desperate love for an illusion.

It is an intense psychological study of a desperate, insecure man's twisted psyche (necrophilia) and loss of equilibrium. It follows the troubled man's obsessive search to end his vertigo (and deaths that result from his 'falling in love' affliction) and becomes a masterful study of romantic longing, identity, voyeurism, treachery and death, female victimization and degrading manipulation, the feminine "ideal," and fatal sexual obsession for a cool-blonde heroine. Hitchcock was noted for films with voyeuristic themes, and this one could be construed as part of a 'trilogy' of films with that preoccupation:

Rear Window (1954)
Vertigo (1958)
Psycho (1960)

The film's screenplay, written by Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor, was based upon the 1954 mystery novel D'Entre les Morts (literally meaning "From Among the Dead" or "Between Deaths") by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. Boileau and Narcejac were also the authors of the story for French director Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diabolique (1955) starring Simone Signoret. The film's theme of play-acting and/or remaking a woman by male domination was also echoed in Greek legend, and in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (and My Fair Lady (1964)). The film spawned clones with similar themes, such as Brian DePalma's Obsession (1976), and director Kenneth Branagh's Dead Again (1991).

2001: A Space Odyssey - 1968

2001 - A Space Odyssey Framed Art Print
16 in. x 22 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com


2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a landmark, science fiction classic - and probably the best science-fiction film of all time about exploration of the unknown. It was released, coincidentally, at the height of the space race between the USSR and the US. It appeared at the same time as NASA's exploratory Apollo Project with manned Earth orbiting missions - a prelude to orbiting and landing on the Moon with Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969. And it prophetically showed the enduring influence that computers would have in our daily lives.

Director Stanley Kubrick's work is a profound, visionary and astounding film (a mysterious Rorschach film-blot) and a tremendous visual experience. This epic film contained more spectacular imagery (about what space looked like) and special effects than verbal dialogue. Viewers are left to experience the non-verbal, mystical vastness of the film, and to subjectively reach into their own subconscious and into the film's pure imagery to speculate about its meaning. Many consider the masterpiece bewildering, boring, slow-moving or annoying, but are still inspired by its story of how man is dwarfed by technology and space.

The first spoken word is almost a half hour into the film, and there's less than 40 minutes of dialogue in the entire film. Much of the film is in dead silence (accurately depicting the absence of sound in space), or with the sound of human breathing within a spacesuit. Kubrick's sci-fi experiment intended to present its story almost purely with visual imagery and auditory signals with very little communicative human dialogue (similar to what was attempted in the surreal, fragmented, non-narrative imagery of the Qatsi trilogy - from 1983-2002, from Godfrey Reggio). All scenes in the film have either dialogue or music (or silence), but never both together.

The film is enriched by stunning, pioneering technical effects, and featured orchestral music, presented in movements like in a symphony, from:

Richard Strauss, Also Sprach Zarathustra
Johann Strauss, The Blue Danube Waltz
György Ligeti, Atmospheres, Lux Aeterna, and Requiem for Soprano, Mezzo-Soprano, Two Mixed Choirs and Orchestra
Aram Khatchaturian, Gayane Ballet Suite

The Third Man - 1949

Carol Reed Coaching Orson Welles as They Stand Against Floodlights During Filming "The Third Man." Premium Photographic Print
Sumits, William
18 in. x 24 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com
Framed   Mounted


The Third Man (1949) is a visually-stylish thriller - a paranoid story of social, economic, and moral corruption in a depressed, rotting and crumbling, 20th century Vienna following World War II. The striking film-noirish, shadowy thriller was filmed expressionistically within the decadent, shattered and poisoned city that has been sector-divided along geo-political lines.

The black and white, pessimistic film is one of the greatest British thrillers of the post-war era, in the best Alfred Hitchcock tradition, and beautifully produced and directed by Britisher Carol Reed. It was voted the #1 British Film of the 20th Century by the esteemed British Film Institute (BFI). It was co-produced by Hungarian-born Alexander Korda and American movie mogul David O. Selznick. Because Korda gave American distribution rights to Selznick (who cut eleven minutes from the original British version), the credits of the US version include Selznick references.

This was Reed's second collaboration with British screenwriter-author Graham Greene (after The Fallen Idol (1948)). It was based on Greene's novella of the same name, written solely to be a source text for the film screenplay and never intended to be read or published. It was a clever and original mystery tale simply evoked by one sentence written by Greene: "I saw a man walking down the Strand, whose funeral I had only recently attended." It told of a love triangle with nightmarish suspense, treachery, betrayal, guilt and disillusionment. Its two most famous sequences include the Ferris-wheel showdown high atop a deserted fairground with the famous cuckoo clock speech (written by Orson Welles), and the climactic chase through the underground network of sewers beneath the cobblestone streets.

Taxi Driver - 1976

Taxi Driver Framed Sign
19 in. x 22 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com


Taxi Driver (1976) is director Martin Scorsese's and screenwriter Paul Schrader's gritty, disturbing, nightmarish modern film classic, that examines alienation in urban society. Scorsese's fourth film, combining elements of film noir, the western, horror and urban melodrama film genres. Historically, the film appeared after a decade of war in Vietnam, and after the disgraceful Watergate crisis and President Nixon's resignation.

It explores the psychological madness within an obsessed, twisted, inarticulate, lonely, anti-hero cab driver and war vet (De Niro), who misdirectedly lashes out with frustrated anger and power like an exploding time bomb at the world that has alienated him. His assaultive unhinging is first paired with a longing to connect with a blonde goddess office worker (Shepherd), and then with an attempt to rescue/liberate a young 12-year old prostitute named Iris (Foster) from her predatory pimp "Sport" (Keitel) and her tawdry, streetwalking life. [The young Foster, who had previously acted for Scorsese in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), was required to undergo psychological tests to see if she would bear up during filming.]

Taxi Driver has been acknowledged as consciously influenced by John Ford's The Searchers (1956) - the story of another angry war veteran and social outcast who becomes obsessed during a search and rescue of his young niece from a long-haired Comanche chief named Scar. Ford's film was about his fanatical quest to liberate the young girl, restore her virtue, and return her to society, in order to purify his own soul, although he remains an outsider.

Sunset Boulevard - 1950

Sunset Boulevard Masterprint
17 in. x 11 in.

Buy at AllPosters.com
Framed   Mounted


Sunset Boulevard (1950) is a classic black comedy/drama, and perhaps the most acclaimed, but darkest film-noir story about "behind the scenes" Hollywood, self-deceit, spiritual and spatial emptiness, and the price of fame, greed, narcissism, and ambition. The mood of the film is immediately established as decadent and decaying by the posthumous narrator - a dead man floating face-down in a swimming pool in Beverly Hills.

With caustic, bitter wit in a story that blends both fact and fiction and dream and reality, co-writer/director Billy Wilder realistically exposes (with numerous in-jokes) the corruptive, devastating influences of the new Hollywood and the studio system by showing the decline of old Hollywood legends many years after the coming of sound. The screenplay was based on the story A Can of Beans by Wilder and Brackett - this was the last collaborative film effort of Brackett and Wilder who had worked together on many films since 1938.