Rig the Poster: Deceitful Nazi Edition

I spent most of last year doing exactly what I'm doing this month with Summer Under the Stars, only on much larger scale: I picked 125 actors from between the period 1930 and 1960 and watched one movie for each of them, for a total of 125 movies between the months of February and December (plus whatever other movies I happened to watch along the way). It helped that I was unemployed for the first three months of this endeavor, and that I didn't yet have a dog, and that I have a very understanding boyfriend; when I tried to repeat the project this year...things didn't go so well. Who knew that a labrador puppy wouldn't care that my DVR was full of unwatched movies?

Anyway, part of what I did during those halcyon days of 2010 was to save the original theatrical poster for each film on my list, so that by the end of the year I had a visual representation of all the different types of films I had watched. I quickly learned two things from searching for those posters: 1) Between theatrical re-releases, VHS covers, DVD covers, and other promotional material, it can be hard to determine which poster, if any, is the original; and 2) A classic film poster doesn't necessarily have to reflect the film's actual content, so long as the poster does its real job of bringing in a larger audience. In other words, film studios have never been above bending the truth if it's going to make them extra money.

The most common example of this, or at least the one I most often ran into, was using a poster to turn a regular film into a so-called "Women's film," the name broadly given to movies released during the thirties, forties, and fifties that were marketed to women, starred women, and dealt almost exclusively with women's problems. Some, like The Old Maid and Stella Dallas, were genuinely good pictures, but to think of them as black-and-white Lifetime movies is probably an apt comparison; almost all women's films from this period presented men as either lovers or adversaries, and quite a few involved the tried and true premise of a poor girl giving up her baby so that the child might have a better life, only to have the child resent her when she gets older. TRAGIC.

Obviously, not all films released during the thirties and forties were women's films, but women did consistently make up the majority of the theater-going public, so it would have benefited any studio to cater to women when designing their posters. Thus, the transformation of a regular movie into a women's film through clever marketing: if you could draw women into the theatre through a romantic embrace or feminine tagline, what did it really matter if the film in question was actually a noir in which the only women present were either scheming harlots or dead within the first thirty minutes?

The most recent example of this I've come across involves the movie I just reviewed for Summer Under the Stars, Orson Welles' The Stranger. The poster I used for my review de-emphasized the tagline, but in a variant version of the poster, the tagline is front and center:

"The most deceitful man a woman ever loved!"

Alright. Well. That's technically true, isn't it? A former Nazi war criminal who (in the movie) is credited with devising the methods of genocide in the German concentration camps would be the most deceitful man a woman ever loved, wouldn't he? I guess I owe the RKO marketing department in 1946 an apology.