From Publishers Weekly
With 10 film poster anthologies already under their belts, editors Nourmand and Marsh turn to "the one genre defined not by content but by attitude": exploitation films. White slavery, motorcycle psychos, crazed beatnik dope fiends and "the seemingly widespread menace of gorillas having sex with young white women"—with enough exclamation points to fill a DD cup, the posters promise it all and ultimately deliver more than did the films themselves. "Teenage killers taking their thrills unashamed!" "The shock by shock confessions of a Sorority Girl." From
Fast and Loose to
Curse of a Teenage Nazi,
High School Hellcats,
The Love Wanga and beyond, the huckster's allure of these posters' salacious images takes us back to some oddly quaint times. Accompanying the posters is a well-written minihistory of the genre's dance with the Hays Code, as well as brief insights into the films, their directors and the poster artists themselves. The large format book covers films from the 1910s through the mid-'70s, after which the genre fell off the map. As film critic Dave Kehr writes in the foreword: "Now that nothing was forbidden, there was nothing left to exploit—the audience's expectations, once so artfully teased, could now be bluntly and banally fulfilled."
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Kurzbeschreibung
Sex, drugs, delinquency, Black power, alternative culture and, of course, rock and roll: these are just a few of the themes which have attracted the attention of the cinema's bottom-feeders over the past eighty years. A few of the resulting films have become cult classics, but most were simply tacky - few would probably now want to sit through two hours of High School Hellcats (1958) or Hot Rod Rumble (1957). The posters produced to promote them, on the other hand, are wonderful period pieces that vividly evoke the social fears, temptations and taboos of bygone eras. Up until the introduction of the Hayes Code in 1934 Hollywood had few inhibitions; the poster for Girl Without a Room (1933), for example, left audiences in little doubt about how the young woman would find accommodation. Later in the decade, it became necessary to adopt the old tabloid trick of pretending that titillating content had a redeeming social message - thus the producers of Marijuana were obliged to present it as a warning about the dangers of drug addiction. In the 1950s, it was the Beats and juvenile delinquents who seemed to threaten middle-class values - and, of course, attracted middle-class kids to the drive-in screens. Then, in the 60s and 70s, came 'Blaxploitation' movies like Shaft, the first of Russ Meyer's mammary-obsessed epics, Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill, and even an animated sexploitation story, Fritz the Cat. The posters for these films, from Albert Vargas' venture into the genre (for Ladies They Talk About, 1933) to Alan Aldridge's photomontage for Warhol's Chelsea Girls (1966), are masterpieces of visual innuendo, offering, in most cases, far more that the movies actually delivered.
