The Great Sinner, 1949
The Great Sinner, 1949
Original MGM one-sheet theatrical poster, framed
41 × 27¼ inches (104.1 × 69.2 cm)
Black frame
The one-sheet is Hollywood's native format — the standard theatrical poster, printed for lobby display, designed to move tickets in the ten seconds a passerby might give it. This example, for Robert Siodmak's 1949 MGM production The Great Sinner, does everything the form demands and then some: Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner rendered in the full saturated illustration style of postwar American commercial art, the tagline reading Possessed by a power more devastating than the seven deadly sins with the confidence of a studio that had no doubts about what it was selling. The cast alone — Peck, Gardner, Melvyn Douglas, Walter Huston, Ethel Barrymore, Agnes Moorehead — signals the kind of deep-bench MGM production that the studio system existed to produce. Loosely adapted from Dostoevsky, the film has faded from the canon; the poster has not. Seventy-five years old, original printing, the colors holding. Framed.