Love in the Afternoon (film poster)
The pattern
This still is filed under Iconic figure claim.
Define
A single figure, drawn, silhouetted, or posed, is the whole claim. You can read it across a street.
Mechanism
Compression into a body. The figure is not decoration. It is the sentence. Distance-legibility is the test.
Verdict
Poster scale, outdoor, packaging at a glance
Why it works
Bass gives roughly half the sheet to an empty black plane, so the only event on the poster is the small puncture at the bottom and the eye is dragged there. The hatpin is the one object drawn at photographic fidelity while everything else is flat and hand-drawn, which makes it read as the real thing entering a made-up world and sets up the gag. Colouring each star name differently turns a contractual billing block into rhythm rather than a grey slab. The innuendo is entirely carried by the picture, which lets the copy stay clean and gets the sheet past 1957 standards.
Steal this when
When the point is something the copy is not allowed to say outright: give the page over to empty space and let one small, hyper-real object tell it. Also good when a long list of names must appear and you want it to feel designed rather than dumped.