The movie star's movie star, Bette Davis—turbulent, quirky, gallant, feisty—blazes in this poster for her second Oscar-winning role. Its red background is the color of the notorious dress that scandalizes southern society. Warner Bros. tossed Davis this epic of a man-eating belle's redemption as a sop for losing Scarlet O'Hara to Vivien Leigh. Among connoisseurs of movie memorabilia, Davis has no female peer.

Although MGM art department head Cedric Gibbons is credited with directing this second, and best, installment of the studio's jungle series, director Jack Conway was the behind-the-scenes troubleshooter who pulled the picture together so beautifully. The exploitation for the film was enlivened by wonderfully naive, sexy artwork by the well-respected New Yorker cover illustrator. No children's book illustration could make the Edgar Rice Burroughs jungle hero more dauntless.

From Warner Bros.' publicity: "You can tell by the cast it's Important! Big!" But no one, least of all the studios or its stars, got worked up over a cliché-ridden melodrama about an embittered nightclub owner risking his neck to cadge exit visas for an old flame and her husband fleeing the Nazis. The studio's idea of a dream trio was Ronald Reagan, Ann Sheridan, and Dennis Morgan. Instead, they got miracles. The film opened in New York on Thanksgiving Day, weeks after the Allies had landed at Casablanca; two months later, the Casablanca Conference saw the convergence of world leaders, making headline news across the globe. And Casablanca itself? Perfect casting, direction, music, and ambience burnished it to pure cinematic legend and Oscar gold.

Even though the American poster [shown here] was attuned only to the movie's topical backdrop—a world at war, love and valor under pressure—a six-sheet fetched over $16,000 at auction in 1987. French posterist Pigeot, whose film advertising career spanned 1920 to 1950, celebrated its myth: swirling, moody, fatalistically romantic. And the Spanish poster is a hashish fantasy, with haunting Bergman seeming to float through an Oriental archway like an oversized Alice in Wonderland. [Both foreign posters appear in the book.]

Is it art or kitsch? Still a debatable point after nearly fifty years of release, Fantasia was envisioned as a project to top Snow White. Walt Disney begged and borrowed $2,300,000 to make it when the studio's fortunes were in the cellar and banks were denying him credit. Disney's attempt to vivify works by Bach, Beethoven, Moussorgsky, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, and Stravinsky with a cast of cavorting fairies, centaurs, toadstools, crocodiles, and hippopotami in tutus was nothing if not nervy.

In 1933 when Paramount dropped the lunatic funny men after the failure of Duck Soup, a comic classic, MGM producer Irving Thalberg rushed to catch their fall with a better contract, posher budgets, and Al Hirschfeld poster campaigns. A Night at the Opera, with its famed "stateroom scene," emerged as perhaps the brothers' best collision of chaos and class.

Constance Bennett, Myrna Loy, Miriam Hopkins, Robert Montgomery, and Frederic March sneered at the roles with which their studios "punished" Colbert and Gable for uppity behavior. Four Oscars and countless imitators later, this screwball comedy about a runaway heiress and a sardonic newspaper reporter on her trail is Capra's jewel. Columbia's cozy artwork implies that romance, not madcap, sold tickets.

The advertising evokes Margaret Mitchell's irresistible characters and storyline, plus the movie's cast and sweep, all of which reaped MGM ten Oscars, over $200 million in rentals, and, for most of its participants, celluloid immortality. Illustrator Seguso helped stoke publicity fires with an admirable series of paintings. Richard Seguso, the artist's son and studio assistant, recalled his volatile father completing the poster paintings—as well as a series of cast portraits—during three frenetic weeks of work. "He was prouder of Gone With The Wind," Richard Seguso says, "than of any other movie work he did in over thirty years."