25 Great Silent Movie Posters

Sometimes a wonderful thing happens once a film is in the can. The marketing department takes over and creates printed materials that, if you’re lucky, accurately reflect the style and content of the picture you’re about to see. And if you’re really lucky, the posters and one sheets of a particular movie transcend mere communication and stand on their own as works of art. Here are twenty-five movie posters from the silent era where message and mode combine to make something extraordinary.

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Greed (1924)

Frank Norris's 1899 novel McTeague became director Erich von Stroheim's cracked masterpiece, a nine-hour-plus epic of which only 130 minutes exist. The story: San Francisco dentist McTeague (Gibson Gowland) marries lottery winner and severe spendthrift Trina (Zasu Pitts), loses his business, is forced to live in poverty, kills his wife in a rage and flees with her secret savings to Death Valley, where he is pursued by Trina's ex-suitor Marcus (Jean Hersholt). I won't spell out what happens next, except to say that the film's final sequence involves brutal heat, profound thirst, a caged canary, an unfortunate bullet hole, a crazed donkey and one of those revelatory moments that make an audience gasp in unison.