George Roy Hill‘s ice hockey comedy was critically panned on release but quickly grew into a cult classic and is considered by many to be the best sports/comedy movie ever made.
This Japanese poster is actually a combination of two of the American one sheets and a promotional still from the film. The artwork by Craig Nelson on the Style A one sheet is combined with the sketch-style artwork (credited to ‘R.G.’) on Style B. The photo of Paul Newman appears to have been taken from this still and his lower half has been illustrated to extend it downwards.
You can watch the original trailer here.
The last film from Jack Hill, the director of several exploitation films such as Foxy Brown and The Swinging Cheerleaders, Sorceress was one of several fantasy films released in the wake of Conan the Barbarian. It currently sits on a meagre IMDb score of 3.7 out of 10 and sounds like something of a clunker:
Sorceress is bad. Astronomically bad. Not the kind of bad that we’re used to. No, not mediocre Hollywood bad. It’s so bad, it’s almost a religious experience.
To be fair, with a poster like this it’s not like the audience were expecting much, as another reviewer points out:
Tremendously fun if you approach it in the correct frame of mind (and probably even better when one is drunk). Oh, did I happen to mention the beautiful boobies on display in this?
This is the international one sheet featuring artwork by American artist Robert Tanenbaum. The other posters I’ve collected by him can be seen here.
The US one sheet looks like this and the original trailer is on YouTube (contains bewbs).
Not only is this probably the best poster artwork for the film that started the biggest sci-fi franchise of all, it’s also considered by many to be the greatest work by the late, great British artist Tom Chantrell. Declaring it so is not an easy decision to make since Chantrell illustrated thousands of posters during his long career and there are many classic designs to choose from, including several Hammer posters and a brilliant design for ‘One Million Years B.C.’. I have a number of other posters by him on this site for you to peruse.
In 2013 I interviewed Chantrell’s widow Shirley about their life together and she recalled how Tom would often ask her to pose so he could capture the correct stance for female characters appearing on his posters. Shirley recalls how the project came about for Tom:
Tom was given an invite to the premier showing and we all went along as a family. As soon as he’d seen the film he had the synopsis, the 10” x 8” press stills and then he started to think about how he was going to tackle the project. From beginning to end it took one month, which is a lot of work for one poster. He’d never taken that long before and I don’t think he did again.
Shirley once again posed for Tom and this time she was his Princess Leia. She not only still has the reference photos taken that day but also still has the same dress she wore.
This poster perfectly captures the excitement and adventure of the seminal sci-fi blockbuster and, although originally intended just to be used for the UK market on the quad, the art was liked so much by Lucasfilm that the decision was made to use it for this style C one sheet, as well as for other posters around the world. George Lucas himself would later purchase the original artwork for his archives and I like to imagine it’s hanging on a wall in Skywalker Ranch.
This particular style of the poster is known as the ‘Oscars version’, so called because it was printed once the film had won a handful of Academy Awards a few months after the original UK release. Whilst it would be nice to have the non-Oscar version I’m certainly not complaining, especially since this one is rolled and in fantastic condition.
Sadly, Tom Chantrell passed away in 2001 and poster historian Sim Branaghan wrote his obituary for the Guardian. He may no longer be with us but his classic designs have stood the test of time and continue to impress decades later.
A joint collaboration between two British production companies, Palace Pictures and Lew Grade’s ITC Entertainment, The Company of Wolves was helmed by the Irish director Neil Jordan and based on a short story by the late English author Angela Carter, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Jordan. The film begins in the modern day with the lead character Rosaleen (played by first-time actress Sarah Patterson) having moved with her parents to a large house in a forest. At night Rosaleen falls asleep and has a vivid dream in which she is a medieval peasant girl who lives with her grandma (played by Murder, She Wrote’s Angela Lansbury) in a woodland village. Sitting by the fire one evening her grandma begins to tell her a story and what follows is a series of surreal, fantasy tales, with multiple narratives and narrators, most of which feature wolves or werewolves, and all of which are ripe with hidden meanings and deeper significances (check out this page on IMDb to give you an idea).
Featuring elements of the classic Little Red Riding Hood fairytale (and indeed the film features a blood red shawl worn by a young girl) the film is a parable of the loss of innocence and the beginning of adolescence and sexual awakening – as the Grandma says at one point ‘Never stray from the path, never eat a windfall apple and never trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle.’ Overcoming a slight budget The Company of Wolves has a dream-like, eerie atmosphere helped in no-small part by excellent production and costume design. There is also a werewolf transformation scene that challenges the famous one seen in American Werewolf in London. Palace Pictures would re-team several more times with Neil Jordan, including for Mona Lisa (1986) and Oscar-winning The Crying Game (1992)
The excellent illustration on this Japanese B2 poster is credited to the illustrator Sumio Tsunoda about whom I was able to discover next to nothing. A search revealed that this cyberpunk image can also be credited to him. If anyone knows any more details about the artist please get in touch or leave a comment.
