How Hollywood depicted Old West in posters
From the horror classic “Psycho” to the aptly titled “Raising Arizona,” the Grand Canyon State has been a popular Hollywood filming location for over a century. One genre’s roots run deeper in Arizona than any other, and that’s the Western.
So it’s not surprising that Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West presents its first exhibition of Western movie posters and lobby cards. The exhibit opened Tuesday, June 20.
The items on display in “The Rennard Strickland Collection of Western Film History” are jointly owned by the museum and the Arizona State University Foundation for a New American University.
“It’s one of the most important collections of Western film in the entire world,” said Tricia Loscher, the chief curator of the exhibition.
The collection was started by American lawyer and professor Rennard Strickland about 50 years ago when he was working on a PBS documentary about the American West, manifest destiny and westward expansion. The documentary was never completed. However, while conducting research, Strickland grew fascinated with how Western themes were depicted in movie posters.
“We really wanted to highlight the collector Rennard Strickland and his amazing collection,” Loscher said. “Knowing the gallery size and the diversity of materials ... I started going through the collection and picking out pieces that Rennard had really spoken in terms of his favorites.”
In that list of favorites, she included the 1931 film “Cimarron,” which is one of only two Westerns to receive a Best Picture Oscar. The other was 1990’s “Dancing With Wolves,” which won Best Picture in 1991.
Strickland’s collection includes more than 5,000 items and is appraised at over $6 million. The museum’s exhibition will feature 85 posters and 30 lobby cards. It’s the first time the museum has presented an exhibit solely of posters.
The exhibition includes multiple foreign posters, and Loscher pointed out various versions of posters for the 1939 John Ford film “Stagecoach,” which made John Wayne a star.
“Along with the (American) ‘Stagecoach’ poster, up above I have the Italian version, which is ‘Ombre Rosse,’ “Loscher said. “You can really see the contrast between what the artists there were doing and how they presented the look of the American West versus what our American graphic designers did with that.”
The posters aren’t the only pieces that tell interesting stories. One of Loscher’s favorite pieces is a lobby card, which is a smaller work that highlights an individual scene. That lobby card is for the 1917 silent Western “Wild and Woolly,” which was filmed in New Mexico.
“They had brought in animals and camels that ended up getting loose,” Loscher said. “So there’s a story today that when they were shooting the film over in New Mexico that the people were running across the desert looking for these animals that strayed.”