JF Ptak Science Books: The Lady Archaeology of Smashnose B-Film Movie Posters.

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1254

There was a certain something going on in the 1950's with nova-express B-film ladys-in-trouble/bad girl/smashnose kissing movies that were made for $5,600 in three days with two days of quality control. The posters made for these beauties were a thing unto themselves, a self-contained and self-limiting genre, a found case of bizarro design and muted inelegancies.

The posters look like their movie names: Juvenile Jungle, Betrayed Women, Girls in Prison, One Girl's Confession, Dragstrip Girl, Girls on the Loose, Pick Up, Girls in the Night, Live Fast Die Young, Alimony Running Wild, Hot Rod Rumble, Running Wild, Blonde Bait, Captive Women, The Party Crashers and of course Lost, Lonely and Vicious.

Generally I think that folks see the big design and the colors, but lurking behind all of that are usually image-bits that sorta tell a part of the story of the film, but in a stubby, grubby way. So I decided to do a little archaeological dig into some of these and give those small images some life through magnification. Sometimes they're surprising and look good big; sometimes they're just badly design and goofy, and would look better smaller, very much smaller---dot-small. Here's a few examples (I'll show the detail first and then the larger, full image of the poster after):

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Detail