Adrian Curry, in his Movie Poster of the Week column that he writes for MUBI, posted this wonderful tribute to the recently departed film icon Lauren Bacall. Curry makes canny note of a phenomenon that, in retrospect, seems like a tremendous disservice to one of the most magnetic faces in cinematic history:

For most of her career, however, while she was never less than a star, she was rarely a leading lady, playing co-star to her great love Humphrey Bogart in four of her first five movies, then to Charles Boyer, Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Rock Hudson, Gregory Peck and so on. As a result, she rarely appeared solo in posters and is often dwarfed by her male co-stars.

His post reproduces almost three dozen details from many of these posters, all focusing on renderings of Bacall’s image. To look at them in aggregate is to realize how distinctive her features really were, how even when filtered through the hand of many different illustrators, they were still able to transmit the actress’s one-of-a-kind, slow-burn sensuality. It also reminds us how wonderful the world was when posters were illustrated by hand, rather than just Photoshopped.

See Curry’s post here.