Artwork by the late, great Richard Amsel features on this one sheet for the 1975 comedy-drama Lucky Lady. The film was helmed by Stanley Donen, an American director who’s best known for Singing in the Rain (1952) and Charade (1963). Gene Hackman appears alongside Burt Reynolds and Liza Minnelli, and the former apparently took some persuading to star. He eventually relented when producers offered him the then significant sum of $1.5m. The film is set in the American prohibition era during which the sale and production of alcohol was banned across the whole country. The plot is described like so:

During the Prohibition era, a young widow, Claire (Minelli), gets involved in liquor smuggling and romance with two men, Walker (Reynolds) and Kibby (Hackman), off the San Diego coast. Organized crime controls bootlegging back east and wants to do the same here, so a hit man named McTeague (John Hillerman) is sent to deal with these amateur crooks, as is the Coast Guard, leading to various battles at sea.

Richard Amsel was born in Philadelphia in 1947 and studied at the city’s College of Art. Whilst there he entered and won a nationwide artist competition to paint the poster for the film ‘Hello Dolly!’. Amsel was just 22 at the time and this win helped him quickly establish a career in New York where he worked on album covers (including one for Barry Manilow) as well as magazine covers and editorial art. In addition, he worked on posters some of the most important films of the 1970s, including Chinatown, Nashville and The Sting. During the 1970s he also worked on a series of covers for the American magazine TV Guide, which are still celebrated to this day.

In the 1980s Amsel worked on what is my favourite Indiana Jones poster, the Raiders of the Lost Ark 1982 re-release one sheet. He had also painted the original release version, featuring a much more serious looking Indy. The artist’s final film poster was the one sheet for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome in 1985. Amsel sadly died of AIDS-related complications that same year. He leaves behind a great legacy of unforgettable artwork, some of which I already have in the Film on Paper collection and which can be seen here.

An unusual illustration with a stylised half-finished look features on this US one sheet for the release of the 1973 film Shamus. It was directed by the late Buzz Kulik who spent the majority of his career directing TV shows and TV movies, including several episodes of The Twilight Zone. The film stars Burt Reynolds who had entered a golden period following his breakout performance in the 1972 film Deliverance. For the rest of the 1970s he would star in two or three films a year, cementing his reputation as a rugged action star and cheeky good ol’ boy, with films like Smokey and the Bandit, as well as an off-screen sex symbol (thanks to things like the infamous magazine centrefold image of him lying on a rug).

Set in New York, Reynolds stars as the titular Shamus McCoy, a hard-living private detective who enjoys drinking, gambling and womanising, but is in need of a new case to top up his bank account. One day he’s approached by an eccentric diamond dealer who’s had a stash of diamonds stolen and Shamus is offered $10k to track them down. What seems like a straightforward case turns out to be nothing of the sort and the PI is thwarted at every opportunity, with a beating by a gang of thugs making him realise he’s onto something big. Shamus teams up with his friend Springy as well as Alexis Montaigne (Dyan Cannon), the sister of a nightclub owner who’s involved in the plot. The gang uncover illegal arms dealing activities and are soon confronted by the deadly intentions of the improbably named, corrupt army Colonel Hardcore (John P. Ryan).

I’ve struggled to identify who is responsible for the artwork so if anyone has any ideas please get in touch. Unusually it features both a smaller illustration and a retouched photographic image. Typically posters from around this period might feature a main photographic image with supporting illustrations (see the Cleopatra Jones poster for example).

John Boorman‘s classic survival tale will celebrate its 40th anniversary next year and it remains a powerful and unique film, with no remake or imitations muddying its legacy. Deliverance has firmly entered the public consciousness and is almost guaranteed to be referenced when film and TV characters leave the city to head into the wild.

It also introduced the idea of mountain men (hillbillies) to folks who’d never visited the kind of country seen in the film. Finally, there’s the famous ‘Duelling Banjos’ music and the oft-quoted ‘squeal like piggy!’ line taken from the infamous rape scene.

This Japanese poster features a mixture of photography and artwork. It appears that the canoes are photographic whilst the river has been enhanced with illustration. The shotgun rising from the water is featured on a handful of other posters for the film, including the British quad and the style B US one sheet.

The original trailer is on YouTube.