Would Dorothy have been so perfectly poised between adolescence and womanhood, had she not skipped along the yellow brick road with lips as red as her ruby slippers? Would Evita (played actually pretty respectably by Madonna) have commanded such power had she not faced the masses with saturated with crimson? Well, she probably would have. It's Evita. 

But that's not to detract from the implicit and far-reaching impact of a simple swipe of red across the lips, set across the wide expanse of a cinema screen. It can turn the meek into the magnetic, the plain to beautiful and does a bloody good line in tragic heroines (Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf, er Demi Moore as Diana Murphy in Indecent Proposal). 

Red lipstick has, over the years, become as vital a prop to a Hollywood film set as a green screen or fake snow. Even in the years before Technicolour came along and burst our eyes open, red lipstick was used almost perpetually throughout the great old black and white celluloids. 

And we've collected them all here in the gallery above for your visual pleasure.