Some screenshots from the 1945 film The Spider, starring Richard Conte, Mantan Moreland, Faye Marlowe, Kurt Krueger and Martin Kosleck. I've always been interested in type and typefaces, the use of type design to convey a message. You wouldn't know it from looking at this ramshackle blog, but I even have a BFA in graphic design!
One thing I like about old movies is the art of type and title design that seems to have largely gone away or fallen to two or three presets. Maybe that's a gross overstatement or misdiagnosis. But even the worst Poverty Row (or sub-PR) picture could have a stunningly designed title or interesting title sequence to ease you into the sinkhole of the film. If you're interested in title design, type design, graphic design, I recommend looking up folks like Robert Brownjohn, Alvin Lustig, Saul Bass, Herb Luballin, Snap Wyatt, Susan Kare and April Greiman.
If you're interested in The Spider, you can stream it online. It's a tight little B-thriller that clocks in at under an hour. Not great--it has plot holes you can drive a Volkswagen bus through --but fun enough. No spider to be seen aside from the spider motif of the faux mind-reader played by Marlowe. If they addressed her as "the spider", I missed it.
Anywho, I've included some other great movie typefaces I've seen as of late, below:
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