RAW DEAL HOLLYWOOD MOVIE POSTERS

Here we go again…just three weeks now until poster number one! I wonder if anyone will be able to guess it? All I know, is that the top ten is sure to please. A reader asked if I could upload the remaining posters at higher resolution. I'll do it for the top 20!

A Poverty Row product made by rising stars director Anthony Mann and cinematographer John Alton, Raw Deal is one of the more revered film noirs. As for its placement, for the first time in the countdown (and hopefully the last) I think I got it wrong. Looking at this again to write the blurb, I think it just doesn’t stack up to the quality of the posters around it and if I could I’d shuffle it backwards ten or fifteen spaces. What originally pushed it up this high was the powerful image of Dennis O’Keefe spotlighted against the brick wall. It’s an image that longtime film noir enthusiasts encounter often — pulled from the poster and used as a prop on all sorts of noir websites and publications. That aside, I think the cobbled together elements that make up the rest of the poster just don’t hold water. I appreciate the title typography but it reminds me too much of the sort of lettering you’d encounter on a 1930s prison picture, and the arrangement of the elements is just too haphazard to be successful. If the yellow background shape were hard-edged and precise it would be an improvement, then the black boxes for the taglines at the top and bottom could just be eliminated — the one at the top is practically invisible anyway. And finally, is it just me or is the image of Claire Trevor based on a different film?