Skyjacked was just one of multiple plane-hijacking films that followed the release of 1970’s Airport and starred Charlton Heston as the pilot of a Boeing 707 hijacked by a crazed Vietnam vet (James Brolin). The hijacker forces the plane to be diverted to Anchorage, Alaska and then onto Russia where he hopes to defect to the Soviets, but he doesn’t count on the determination of the pilot.

The simplified, symbolic image of the airplane on this 30×40 US poster has the feeling of a Saul Bass design but I don’t believe it to be the work of the legendary graphic designer. If you have any ideas of who is responsible for it please get in touch.

The original trailer is on YouTube (in poor quality).

A striking, garishly-coloured design on this international one sheet (printed in the US for English-speaking territories) for the little-seen Italian film Winged Devils (originally titled Forza G). Helmed by screenwriter (of films like For a Few Dollars More) turned director Duccio Tessari, the film follows the exploits of a young pilot who wants to join the Italian air force’s acrobatic stunt team and must prove himself worthy to join the ranks of the ace pilots. As can be inferred from this poster, the story also concentrates on his life on the ground, although McGinnis’ skill at painting leggy beauties probably oversells that part of the plot. The film wasn’t, as far as I can tell, released in American or British cinemas and it appears to have never been released on home video anywhere. There are no reviews for the film on IMDb, which is very unusual.

Robert McGinnis was responsible for some of the most iconic James Bond posters, including Thunderball,  The Man With the Golden Gun and Diamonds are Forever as well as multiple other classic posters from the 60s, 70s and 80s. He was born in Cincinatti, Ohio in 1926 and was given an apprenticeship at Walt Disney studios before studying fine art at Ohio State University. After serving in the Merchant Marines during World War II, he started work in the advertising industry and later moved into painting book jackets for several notable authors, as well as editorial artwork for the likes of Good Housekeeping, TIME and The Saturday Evening Post. McGinnis’ first film poster was the now iconic one sheet for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, painted in 1962, and he went on to paint over 40 others during his career, including one for The Incredibles in 2004.

To see the other posters I’ve collected that were painted by McGinnis click here.

Legendary American director Sam Peckinpah‘s contract with Warner Bros had come to an acrimonious end after the The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) ended up $3 million over budget and 19 days late. The notoriously prickly director found further opportunities very limited in Hollywood and decided to travel to England to film Straw Dogs, a thriller based on the novel The Siege of Trencher’s Farm by Scottish author Gordon Williams.

Starring Dustin Hoffman in arguably one of his greatest screen roles, the film sees timid mathematician David Sumner (Hoffman) leaving America to live with his English wife Amy (Susan George), in a fictional Cornish village. Before long David’s patience and resolve is tested by a gang of local men who harass the couple and, in a particularly controversial sequence, two of the men take it in turns to rape Amy. As the title of the source novel suggests, the film ends with a violent confrontation, which sees David pushed beyond the limits. Like many of Peckinpah’s films, Straw Dogs was heavily criticised for its violence, although the director defended the film as an exploration of the subject and claimed Hoffman’s character showed his true side during the climax.

This Japanese poster chose to focus on Hoffman as the film’s main draw, likely due to the successes of The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy in Japan at the end of the 1960s. The film seems to have been given unique advertising campaigns in most of the countries it was released in and there were a few US one sheets, including this classic image of Hoffman and a rather strange alternative style featuring a literal straw dog!

The original trailer is on YouTube.

The first in a line of blaxploitation horror films, Blacula was produced by the prolific studio American International Pictures who’d had success in the 1960s with a series of horrors directed by Roger Corman and based on Edgar Allan Poe‘s stories, which included House of Usher and The Raven. During the 1970s they produced multiple blaxploitation films that included Coffy and Foxy Brown, and they are credited with making Pam Grier a household name.

Blacula tells the story of Manuwalde an African prince (played by William Marshall) who is bitten by Count Dracula after visiting him to ask for his help in the ending the slave trade. Imprisoned in a coffin in the 18th century, the prince is unwittingly transported to Los Angeles two hundred years later by antique dealers who sell his casket. Unleashed on the city, Manuwalde goes on the hunt for human blood and later comes across the beautiful Tina (Vonetta McGee) who is the reincarnation of his old wife that was murdered by Dracula. Unfortunately one of Tina’s friends, Dr. Gordon Thomas (played by the brilliantly named Thalmus Rasulala) learns of the prince’s true nature and vows to hunt him down.

The film was followed a year later by a sequel called Scream, Blacula Scream. Another production company put together Blackenstein and Sugar Hill (1974) was AIP’s blaxploitation zombie film.

The original trailer is on YouTube.

This is the Japanese B2 for the release of the 1971 biography of the legendary stuntman Evel Knievel that was made whilst he was only 32 years old and still at the height of his fame. It was also before his infamous attempted jumping of Snake River Canyon in 1974 that ended in a near fatal crash. The film was shot in Evel’s home town of Butte, Montana and starred the prolific actor George Hamilton as the man himself.

The film is told in a series of flashbacks with Evel narrating various incidents that happen throughout the film, including events regarding his relationship with his wife. It features actual footage of Knievel on his bike and completing various stunts, including one on the Ontario Motor Speedway. The film ends with Evel at the edge of the Grand Canyon because the real stuntman was planning a jump of the famous landmark that never came to pass.

The film is now out of copyright and is in the public domain, freely available to watch online should you wish to do so.

A strong contender for one of the earliest entries into the ‘slasher’ sub-genre of horror, Fright was filmed in the UK by Peter Collinson, perhaps best known as the director of the original The Italian Job. The film focuses on the plight of a babysitter, played by Susan George, who suffers a series of frightening occurrences after the parents (Honor Blackman and George Cole) leave for the evening, but before long the real terror arrives in the shape of the child’s biological father (Ian Bannen), a recent escapee from a mental asylum.

Fright is notorious for its brutal scenes of violence and is one of several films that raised the bar in terms of the depiction of on-screen horror following the relaxation of censorship rules at the start of the 1970s. This was the second film released in 1971 to feature Susan George being subjected to domestic terror, the other being Sam Peckinpah’s brilliant Straw Dogs.

The original trailer is on YouTube.

Hammer was an early entry in the blaxploitation subgenre of films that grew in popularity following the release of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft in 1971. The film stars ex-NFL player Fred Williamson whose nickname was The Hammer in real life and who would go on to become one of the subgenre’s key players. It was helmed by Kiwi director Bruce Clark who only has four directorial credits to his name, which includes the Roger Corman-produced sci-fi clunker Galaxy of Terror.

Williamson stars as B.J. Hammer a dockworker who is spotted as having some boxing talent by a shady trainer. He rises up the ranks and gains some notoriety but thing soon turn sour when his manager, who is also a dodgy gangster, asks him to throw his next fight in order to make some other crooks rich (that old chestnut). His girfriend Lois, played by another blaxploitation stalwart Vonetta McGee), is kidnapped by the gangsters in an effort to coerce Hammer into taking a dive, which means it’s time to show them what he’s capable of.

The film is today considered one of the lesser entries in the blaxploitation subgenre and it holds a fairly poor rating on IMDb, but it’s still one to seek out for fans of Williamson. This Japanese B2 poster features a unique photo montage as was typical of the era.

In August 2011 I was lucky enough to visit the island of Cuba for a ten day trip, which was a fantastic experience. It really does feel like a country stuck in a time warp, circa 1965, particularly once you leave the capital and head into the countryside. It’s a stunningly beautiful island with very hospitable people but the relative poverty of the country is clear to see. It’s often said that the government is likely to relax the current freeze on foreign (particularly Western) investment once ‘Comandante’ Fidel Castro passes away, although with his brother Raul currently in charge very little has changed. This article on the BBC gives you an insight into the current situation.

The Cuban people’s love for film and cinema-going is legendary and our guidebook claimed that at the end of the 1950s there were over 300 cinemas in the capital Havana alone. Today, these great old buildings continue to thrive and whilst there I witnessed the queues of people lining up to see the latest releases. I took this picture of the Yara cinema in the Vedado area of Havana before the evening crowds descended.

Whilst in Havana I visited a bookshop that was selling original Cuban propaganda posters printed in the 1950s and 60s by OSPAAAL. They also had a handful of screen-printed film posters, all of which were reprints of the original Cuban cinema posters or re-imagined designs by local artists. They are officially screen printed by the ICAIC (Instituto Cubano de Artes Industrias Cinematografia) in Havana.

This poster for Francis Ford Coppola‘s classic crime epic The Godfather was designed and illustrated by Antonio Pérez González Ñiko. Born in Havana in 1941, Ñiko (as he is known) studied a Bachelor degree in Art at the city’s university before getting a job at a graphic design agency. He was instrumental in designing multiple posters for the Cuban revolutionary movement in the 1960s and 1970s as well as many film posters in conjunction with the ICAIC.

Now a resident of Mexico, Ñiko works as a professor of Graphic Design at the Gestalt Design School in Xalapa, Veracruz. He continues to design and paint and his work has been featured in countless exhibitions around the world. His personal blog can be viewed here. Galleries of his work can be viewed on his Cargo Collective website here, and the sheer number of film posters he’s worked on is nothing short of incredible.

Whilst in Havana I also picked up a few other posters, one of which (A Clockwork Orange) I have already posted here.

A truly international production, Red Sun was filmed in Spain by the British director Terence Young and starring American action legend Charles Bronson,the Japanese actor Toshirô Mifune (best known for Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai), French superstar Alain Delon and the gorgeous Swiss actress Ursula Andress. Terence Young had previously seen great success directing Sean Connery in three of his outings as James Bond.

The film sees two ruthless robbers, Link (Bronson) and Gauche (Delon) who attack a train bound for Washington carrying the Japanese ambassador. During the raid Gauche steals a very valuable sword and then betrays Link, trying to kill him before escaping with the loot. Link must team up with the only surviving Samurai escort of the ambassador (Mifune) and track down Gauche before it’s too late.

Bronson had previously starred in The Magnificent Seven, an American remake of Seven Samurai. The main figures on this poster appear to be photographic and I’m uncertain who is responsible for the artwork above them.

A landmark American film, Easy Rider defined a generation and was a touchstone of the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Directed, co-written by and starring the late Dennis Hopper, the film was produced by Peter Fonda, who also helped to write the screenplay and starred alongside Hopper as one of two bikers who set off on a cross-country trip through the Southern United States. At the beginning of the film Wyatt (Fonda) and Billy (Hopper) pull off a successful drug deal and decide to take their earnings and ride from Los Angeles to New Orleans to attend the forthcoming Mardi Gras festival.

Along the way the pair meet an assortment of unusual characters, including a hippie hitchhiker (Luke Askew) who takes them to a commune, drunken lawyer George (Jack Nicholson in a career-defining role) who helps them to escape jail and joins them on their trip, and a pair of prostitutes (Karen Black and Toni Basil). They also experience the hostility of the authorities and suspicious locals whose aggression towards the bikers leads them question if the halcyon days of the early 1960s are well and truly over. After one particular encounter George comments ”You know, this used to be a helluva good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.”

The film is infamous for its scenes featuring actual drug use (prominently marijuana) and, thanks to its incredible box-office success, Easy Rider is also credited with kickstarting a new era in Hollywood that saw a slew of low-budget films helmed by avant-garde directors being financed, particularly once studio heads realised the profits easily outweighed the initial production costs. Thanks to the success of the film Dennis Hopper was given carte-blanche for his next directorial effort, 1971′s The Last Movie; a film that saw woeful critical and commercial performance and effectively ended his career as a director for over a decade.

This is the Japanese poster for the film, which features the stylised portrait of Fonda, as featured on the American one sheets. The colour scheme and use of stars is unique to this poster and there is also a blue version featuring the same design, which I have in my collection and can be viewed here.

The film’s original trailer is on YouTube.

A Japanese double-bill poster for re-release of ace director Werner Herzog‘s two masterpieces. Made ten years apart, both films star Klaus Kinski, a frequent collaborator, and the stories behind the making of the films are legendary.

Fitzcarraldo tells the true story of  one man’s obsession to build an opera house in the Peruvian jungle, a task that sees him having to drag a full-sized steamer boat over a mountain from one river to another. Rather than rely on special effects or clever editing, Herzog and the crew actually did drag a steamer boat over a mountain! The story of the shoot was told in the excellent documentary Burden of Dreams.

Aguirre, Wrath of God was a similarly chaotic and pressured shoot and the story goes that when Kinski decided to leave the set and return home, Herzog pulled a gun on him and threatened to shoot him and then turn the gun on himself.

Herzog once said of Kinski: “People think we had a love-hate relationship. Well, I did not love him, nor did I hate him. We had mutual respect for each other, even as we both planned each other’s murder”.

I believe this double-bill poster was for a Japanese release in either 2000 or 2001 and the artwork is by an artist called Suzuki Cohjizukin about whom I know very little. Some of his other works can be found with a google search but if anyone knows anything more about him please get in touch.

Here are the original trailers for Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre.