Striking Poses by Richard Schickel

This compilation presents 160 full-colour publicity photographs of movie stars created by the movie studios to evoke Hollywood reality but which are now seen as unwitting lapses into surrealism.

From Publishers Weekly:

Time magazine film critic Schickel dips into an archive of movie memorabilia and presents 160 Hollywood publicity shots from the 1930s through the 1960s. His contention that movie stars “saw these pictures as a form of degradation” is perhaps validated by photographs of Janet Leigh promoting Kid Rodelo arrayed in a gun belt encircling a garter belt and of Carroll Baker posed on a bearskin rug. But, for the most part, Schickel flippantly tosses out ludicrous and empty reflections, for example, on WW II patriotic stills: “Who is to say these pin-ups did not do more to shorten the conflict than most of us did?” The book itself proves to be a glitzy facet of the very “form of human exploitation” it purports to expose and censure.