It’s no secret that Italian movie posters from the 1940s and 50s often feature superior designs to their American counterparts. Artists in the domestic publicity departments at the Hollywood studios often labored under strict managerial oversight and had to contend with the prudish dictates of the Production Code. Not so overseas, where talented painter-designers were given a freer hand to express themselves and sell a film to the public. In this creatively fecund climate, artists such as Anselmo Ballester, Angelo Cesselon, Averardo Ciriello, and Ercole Brini created some of the most lavish and sensuous posters in the history of commercial cinema. Coming under the hammer in our Vintage Poster Signature Auction on April 23-24 is an original hand-painted maquette by movie poster maestro Ercole Brini for Otto Preminger’s seminal film noir, Laura (20th Century Fox, 1944). Brini’s rendering of a Gene Tierney as “Laura Hunt” not only captures the young actress’s beauty but adds an ethereal quality appropriate to the film’s thematics. In the movie, Dana Andrews plays a hardboiled detective who falls in love with a purported murder victim based on a spectacular painted portrait of the unfortunate girl. The quality of Brini’s poster design actually brings that outlandish plot device into the realm of possibility. Whereas the original U.S. release poster presents straightforward likenesses of the film’s stars with an image of a rifle-wielding figure for drama, Brini actually replicates the experience of watching the movie. He imbues the composition with mystery as a shadowy figure intrudes and threatens to eclipse Tierny’s Laura. Sadly, none of the posters that resulted from this original artwork are known to survive, making this original artwork all the more important and desirable.
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