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The icon-establishing performances Marilyn Monroe gave in Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot (1959) are ones for the ages, touchstone works that endure because of the undeniable comic energy and desperation that sparked them from within even as the ravenous public became ever more enraptured by the surface of Monroe’s seductive image of beauty and glamour. Several generations now probably know her only from these films, or perhaps 1955’s The Seven-Year Itch, a more famous probably for the skirt-swirling pose it generated than anything in the movie itself, one of director Wilder’s sourest pictures, or her final completed film, The Misfits (1961), directed by John Huston, written by Arthur Miller and costarring Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift.

But in Don’t Bother to Knock (1952) she delivers a powerful dramatic performance as Nell, a psychologically devastated, delusional, perhaps psychotic young woman apparently on...

Above: 1978 re-release poster for Tabu (F.W. Murnau, USA, 1931)

I only recently came across the posters of German artist Boris Streimann (1908-1984)—who was known to also sign his work as B. Namir—and was immediately struck by both the dynamism and the color of his work. The author of hundreds, if not thousands, of posters from the late 20s through the late 60s, Streimann loved diagonals. All of the posters I have selected— the best of his work that I could find—work off a strong diagonal line, with even his varied and very inventive title treatments (which could have been the work of another designer) often placed on an angle. On top of the sheer energy and movement of his posters, his use of color is extraordinary: brash and expressionistic like his brushwork. I especially love the multi-colored accordion in Port of Freedom, the loin cloth in Tabu, and...

Film director whose quirky career covered sci-fi, westerns, drama and Hammer horror

Roy Ward Baker, who has died aged 93, progressed from teaboy to director of sturdy British dramas to weird Hammer horrors, via Hollywood. It was a rather quirky career for a very straightforward man. Baker – who directed Marilyn Monroe in Don't Bother to Knock and made the camp Mexican western The Singer Not the Song, the lesbian The Vampire Lovers and the transsexual Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde – insisted on calling himself "a simple-minded English lad". Perhaps the film closest to his personality was A Night to Remember (1958), which many would argue is the best of the cinematic versions of the story of the sinking of the Titanic.

Roy Horace Baker (he frequently replaced his middle name with Ward, his mother's maiden name) was born in London into a middle-class family. As a boy, he was sent to study...