American

Few film posters can claim to be truly iconic, but Saul Bass's spiral and silhouette design for Alfred Hitchcock's haunting masterpiece Vertigo is certainly one of them. One of the best regarded and most influential graphic designers of all time, Saul Bass worked with Hitchcock to create a cohesive brand identity for the film, from the title and credit sequence to the poster and advertising campaign. The pulsing orange background, edgy hand-cut lettering and dizzy silhouettes against a spinning vortex combine to create a mesmerising vertigo effect, emphasising and mirroring the psychological experience of the film. Sixty years later Bass's timeless design still packs a punch and has become synonymous with the film, which itself replaced Citizen Kane as the greatest film ever made in the 2012 British Film Institute's Sight & Sound critics' poll.

Starring James Stewart in his fourth and final Hitchcock collaboration, the classic film noir suspense thriller follows the desperate doomed romance of Stewart's troubled acrophobic detective as he investigates the bizarre behaviour of an old friend's wife (Kim Novak) and struggles to overcome his deathly vertigo. A masterful study of romantic longing, voyeurism, manipulation and deception, the protagonist's fatal obsession for the blonde heroine reflected what we now know to be the director's own obsessions.

US window card posters were produced to advertise in the windows of local stores, with a top portion left blank for the cinema to add their details. As such, it is common to find trimmed window cards from this period, where the top portion with cinema details has been removed by fans or collectors over the years to improve a poster's appearance for display. This window card has been trimmed from its original 22x14 in. dimensions and is priced accordingly.

Condition

Good (B-)

Unfolded cardstock, not backed. Upper edge trimmed by 4½ in. Darkening to edges and bumps to corners. Light staining to lower edge. A couple of negligible creases. Small brown stain to left edge. Old mount tape verso. Image and colours excellent. Would look spectacular framed.