Film posters of the 40s

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Lights down, curtain up on the cinema of the 1940s, a decade that produced some of the most critically acclaimed movies of all time. These range from the iconic Casablanca, starring a cynical, world-weary Humphrey Bogart and a never-more-beautiful Ingrid Bergman, to Orson Welles' seminal Citizen Kane, and from the optimistic It's A Wonderful Life to the enigmatic The Third Man, recently voted best British film of all time by the critics. This was the decade when Hollywood introduced cinema audiences to one of the greatest of all genres the film noir, still epitomised by movies like Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, Gilda and The Maltese Falcon - a darkly sinister world of gumshoes, double-crossing dames, bent cops and blind alleys. The world may have been at war for the first half of the decade and Europe in ruins for the second, but this was, in many ways, a golden age of cinema. Moreover, as this book shows, the passage of time has not diminished the impact of the 40s poster art that had contemporary audiences queuing to see the latest releases starring movie immortals like Robert Mitchum and Rita Hayworth.