Classic films, great posters, great memories

At The Budapest Times we’re into cinema history – the silent era then the “talkies”, pre-code Hollywood with a bit of bite, comedies (but not that irritating screwball stuff so much), some cowboys and injuns out in the Wild West, war on the battlefields and behind enemy lines, soppy love stories (why not?), a good thriller, quota quickies, Poverty Row B-movies and the rest. We watch a whole lot (though not so keen on horror, science-fiction or fantasy).

But it’s hard to beat a terrific crime or mystery outing, especially genuine film noir, with rival gangsters machine-gunning each other from the running boards of speeding cars, shady  backroom docs patching up the shot-up hoods, and perfect “jobs” where nothing can go wrong and it’ll set you up for life (though something surely does go wrong – even if the crims escape with the loot they start to double-cross each other).

Or how about a tremendous police procedural where dogged detectives track down the miscreants clue by clue by clue. (One giveaway: dopey bad guys often wear dark shirts and fedoras, they frequent pool halls and talk out of the sides of their mouths.)

And then there’s the artwork for such escapades, which is another world of its own. This tends to be lurid, splashy, sexy, violent, super colourful, suggestive and with titles and tags that shout for attention – try “Dangerous Blondes” or “Blondes at Work” or “Manhunt of the Century”, check out the dolls on the “Murder, My Sweet” and “My Gun is Quick” posters.

There’s “Vicki” starring Jeanne Crain and Jean Peters plus a catchphrase promising “She had everything a man could ever want and lived the way no woman ever should!”. And “The Case of the Lucky Legs” or “The Circus Queen Murder” as proof that a good dollop of sex sells.

Fantastic. Plus one of the great things about this collection of 800 cinema posters – eye-popping indeed – is that not only do we find some films we have watched, sometimes more than once, but we also discover a whole bunch more that we can now hunt for on YouTube, the Internet Archive or one of those naughty bitTorrent sites. The Pirate Bay is still going.

There are 12 sections in the book and a whole one is dedicated to “Sherlock Holmes on the Silver Screen” alone. Here is surely the greatest fictional detective of all time, created by Arthur Conan Doyle, and Holmes and his sidekick Doctor Watson are great favourites of ours, in particular the 14 films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in the starring roles, posters for  every one of which are included here.

So too is a shot of Clive Brook, with magnifying glass, in the very first Holmes film, “The Return of Sherlock Holmes” from 1929. As can be seen, Holmes was also played by William Gillette, John Barrymore, Reginald Owen, Arthur Wontner, Peter Cushing, Robert Stephens and more. There were offshoots also, such as “Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother” with Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman, and Holmes meeting Sigmund Freud in “The Seven Per-Cent Solution”, both seen here. Peter Cook too in a spoof of “The Hound of the Baskervilles”.

We are particularly pleased to note a poster for “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes”, directed by the great Billy Wilder. His film has a superbly choreographed scene in which Holmes (Robert Stephens) and Watson (Colin Blakely) go to a theatre after Holmes has been summoned by the leading lady. It turns out that she is retiring and wants the brainy detective to father a baby for her, an entanglement he evades by leading her to believe that he and Watson are lovers. They aren’t, of course. Meanwhile, Watson has been having the time of his life backstage carousing with the ballerinas until word of his sexual “nature” slowly reaches the girls and they drift away one by one to be replaced seamlessly by the cast’s gay men, unnoticed at first by the good doctor who is then furious when he realises and wants Holmes’ blood. It’s brilliantly done and one of the funniest scenes we’ve ever seen.

Interestingly, there are a couple of films featuring Arsène Lupin, a fictional gentleman thief and master of disguise created in 1905 by French writer Maurice Leblanc, and criminal counterpart to Holmes, often encountering “Herlock Sholmès” in his own misdeeds. John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore and Melvyn Douglas starred in these, and in similar vein were the “Raffles” films with House Peters, Ronald Colman or David Niven as the charming thief.

Many other filmic series are displayed here, such as the eminent “Thin Man” features with sleuthing spouses William Powell and Myrna Loy, “The Saint” and “The Falcon” with acting brothers George Sanders and Tom Conway. Also from the world of fiction come Charlie Chan, Mr Moto, Boston Blackie, Philo Vance, Ellery Queen, Nick Carter, Nero Wolfe, Dick Tracy, Inspector Maigret, Bulldog Drummond, The Whistler, The Shadow, The Lone Wolf and 007.

Genre writers such as Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Rex Stout, Leslie Charteris and Dashiell Hammett help provide the non-stop mayhem  – “Murder in Greenwich Village”, Murder By the Clock”, “Murder Over New York”, “The Kennel Murder Case”, “The Penguin Pool Murder”, “Murder, My Sweet” (with an enticing lady portrayed), “Murder Cruise”, etc.

More great titles abound, suitably illustrated – “Rendezvous at Midnight”, “Who Killed Gail Preston?”, “Racket Busters”, “Kiss the Blood Off My Hands”, “A Kiss Before Dying”, “Killer’s Kiss”, “The Lady in the Morgue”, “Blackmail”, “My Gun Is Quick” (another gal in her undies).

Remember those women reporters Nancy Drew and Brenda Starr, the distaff side of detection? Hungary’s own, Béla Lugosi, is here with “The Human Monster”, so too his partner in horror, Boris Karloff. Con artists, forgers, stoolies (stool pigeons, or police informers) abound. Be careful or you could be wearing concrete shoes in the river. Crime pops up all over the place – “Kansas City Confidential”, “The Phenix City Story”, “The Underworld Story”, “New Orleans After Dark”, “King of Chinatown”, “Hong Kong Nights”.

Here’s another film we love, “King of the Underworld”, a minor Humphrey Bogart outing from 1939 but one of his most enjoyable, especially the ending where this “Napoleon of crime” and his gang are temporarily blinded after being persuaded to have eye drops and are then reduced to spraying bullets willy-nilly as the cops close in on their hideout.

“The Big Heat” is a shocking memory with Lee Marvin throwing scalding coffee into Gloria Grahame’s face. Similarly, Mae Clark famously got a grapefruit in the puss from James Cagney in “The Public Enemy”. “The Killer That Stalked New York” is about the hunt not for a murderer but for someone unwittingly carrying a deadly contagious disease. And there was “D.O.A.” with fatally poisoned Edmond O’Brien trying to discover his killer before he dies.

One regret: all those beautiful posters from the silent era but how many of these films are now lost and only the artwork remains? And one wonders: how many more of the paying public were lured in to watch a sub-par, low-budget film at their local Odeon, Rialto, Roxy or Regal thanks to a particularly promising poster? The 800 striking examples here remind us that however much these films set out to expose the evils of gangland, we audiences got to share vicariously in the unprincipled pleasures of get-rich-quick guys and their slutty gals. If the cops and private dicks didn’t catch up with them first.