Poster of a Girl - 1940 Edition: You May Kiss the Doll Now [1940 Week]

There’s no theme week without posters. Luckily, there aren’t so many posters to find from 1940 (at least not as easy as with more recent years), so the list is much shorter this time. Interestingly, the designs are much more sparse and simple than in later years. So, there is not quite as much to analyze as usual, but still enough, so here we go.

What a collection of rainbow-colored faces for a movie called Black Friday. Yes, that’s weird and adding a terrified woman doesn’t really help. Note one theme in 1940 posters: faces and anatomy are not necessarily meant to be realistic, even without the disaster of photoshop nowadays. They all have a certain doll-like quality that is eerie.

Another theme: women slightly below men, looking up, waiting to be kissed. And very rosy cheeks.

In this case, how does this even work? Where are they in relation to each other? Great tagline, though, that the selling point is the “fire and fury” of its stars.

Frightened women are bad enough, but being frightened of this ghost? I kind of want to see that movie, if only to know what the actual ghost looks like.

There are some implications here that I don’t get, but the title and the strange quote and all the weird faces looking in all directions intrigue me. What exactly is this movie about?

You have to admire this poster, especially in the context of all the others. No big “star” faces, just a group of dirty, poor people standing around, looking grim. No glamour, no show, just that. Even today I couldn’t imagine a poster like that.

That is an odd tagline couple with a strange poster. Does he tell her what men are like? Does he teach her? Does his treatment of her shape her image of men? She doesn’t really look like she needs any help. Weird.

The inevitable adventure poster full of racist stereotypes. That yellow-skinned kid looks seriously deformed.

Even Zorro gets the ladies to lie on their back and stare vacantly not at him while being kissed.

If you know nothing, you could assume that Errol Flynn plays a lunatic here and that the movie focuses on the villain. Luckily, we get the image of him kissing a woman, so everything’s fine.

And another woman bend over backwards by a man. An additional one clinging to a man’s shoulder, to reinforce the idea of the weak woman.

From a distance you'd probably still not be able to distinguish between any of these posters, but we learned something, right?