A man versus giant killer fish film that was released two years after the original summer blockbuster Jaws, Orca was always going to be compared to Spielberg’s classic even if its lead actor, the late Richard Harris, was apparently angered by the links; ‘I get really offended when people make the comparison’, he is quoted as saying at the time of release. The late Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis was determined to one-up the spectacle of Jaws and tasked the screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni to “find a fish tougher and more terrible than the great white”, which led them to the killer whale and production on ‘Orca’ began.

Harris plays Nolan, the Irish captain of a fishing boat operating in the waters off the coast of northern Canada who hears of a lucrative contract being offered for the live capture of a killer whale and hopes the bounty will pay off the mortgage on his boat. After Nolan and his crew accidentally spear a pregnant female killer whale they drag it onto the ship where it miscarries, and almost dies, before the male (Orca) attacks the ship, killing one of the crew before the female is cut loose and falls into the water. The next morning the body of the female whale washes up on shore and before long it becomes clear that Orca is out for revenge, as he attacks the fishing village and destroys vital fuel lines. The villagers insist Nolan is responsible and task him with killing Orca so he sets off with the remainder of his crew, plus marine biologist Rachel Bedford (Charlotte Rampling) and a native American killer whale expert (Will Sampson). The whale leads the boat away from the village into frozen, iceberg covered waters and the stage is set for a final confrontation.

Unfortunately for De Laurentiis and all involved the film was critically derided and sank quickly at the box office, particularly since the juggernaut that was Star Wars was already smashing box office records around the world. The idea of a vengeful fish obviously didn’t go down too well with audiences, although the people behind 1987’s awful Jaws: The Revenge must have forgotten this by the time it was decided to make a third Jaws sequel. The practice of hunting and capturing killer whales to feed the demand from aquariums in the 1960s and 70s was sadly all too prevalent, as documented in the recent heartbreaking documentary Blackfish, which also points out that there are no documented cases of humans being killed by the whales in the wild.

The artwork on the American one sheet was painted by John Berkey who also worked on the poster for the De Laurentiis produced remake of King Kong a year earlier, and the Orca art was also used for the British quad. The Japanese marketing campaign, however, featured at least three B2-sized posters, including this one, that featured artwork apparently unique to the posters and only the B1 format used the Berkey painting. I’ve called this B2 style C and there’s also the style A and style B. There’s a signature that looks like ‘Dino’ at the bottom of the art (see picture 5) but if anyone knows which artist this belongs to please get in touch.

Check out the bonkers original trailer on YouTube.

King Kong Lives is the critically-mauled and commercially disastrous sequel to the ill-advised 1976 remake of the classic big ape monster movie, which was shepherded into life by the legendary Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis. I’m not entirely sure why a decade passed before this sequel was put into production, but both De Laurentiis (or at least his company DEG) and director John Guillermin returned and definitely shouldn’t have bothered. The gap is explained in the film by having Kong in a 10 year coma following his fall from the World Trade Center at the end of the previous film.

Linda Hamilton (who should have known better) stars as Dr. Amy Franklin who is attempting to perform a heart transplant with an electronic replacement but Kong has lost too much blood for the operation to proceed. Luckily the adventurer Hank Mitchell (Brian Kerwin) finds and captures another giant ape in the jungles of Borneo and brings it to the US so that the operation can go ahead. It turns out that the new ape is a female and once Kong’s heart is replaced it’s not long before he escapes with ‘Lady Kong’ and chaos ensues. Unfortunately, despite the premise, the entire cast looks as if they’d rather be somewhere else and the shoddy effects can’t paper over the cracks.

This artwork appears on the Japanese B1 and B0 posters. The B0 size of poster is typically used in larger cinemas and in advertising spots in the Tokyo metro. I’ve struggled to find out who the artist is for this poster so please get in touch if you have an idea. There are also two B2 posters for the film (style A and style B).

Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams is the second film in his so-called ‘Trilogy of Death’, following on from his breakout debut hit Amores Perros (2000), with Babel completing the trilogy in 2005. Like the first film, 21 Grams features three main characters and plot lines that interweave around a fatal car accident and its consequences. Sean Penn plays Paul Rivers, a mathematics professor who is close to death from heart failure after years of smoking and abusing his body, and his wife Mary (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is desperate to conceive a child before he dies. Benicio Del Toro plays Jack Jordan, a reformed criminal who has spent many years in jail and is now trying to go straight by helping out at church and counselling kids who are on a similar path that he took. Naomi Watts plays Cristina Peck, a former drug addict who has settled down into suburban life with husband Michael (Danny Huston) and two daughters.

One fateful day, Jack accidentally hits Michael and the kids with his car, putting Michael into a coma and killing the daughters instantly. A grief-stricken Cristina returns to her drug-taking past but not before agreeing to have her husband’s organs donated. Jack is given Michael’s heart and eventually decides to track down the donor with the aid of a private detective. The rest of the film deals with the encounters between the characters. The title refers to the early 20th-century research of an American doctor called Duncan MacDougall who attempted to prove the existence of the human soul by recording a small loss of weight immediately after death. His methods detected varying amounts but 21 grams, or three quarters of an ounce, was the first recorded instance. The original marketing campaign compared this weight to a ‘stack of nickels’, a chocolate bar and a hummingbird and this explains why the creature appears on this poster.

The film was very well critically received and was a success with worldwide audiences, although today it’s IMDb rating doesn’t quite match that of the first film in the trilogy. This poster design is unique to the Japanese marketing campaign.

Paul Bartel, the late actor/director who was at the helm of the cult b-movie Death Race 2000 (released a year earlier), stuck with the cross-country car chase theme with this 1976 flick Cannonball, though he removed most of the gore that gave the former film its notoriety. The film and title are based on the exploits of Erwin G. “Cannon Ball” Baker, a legendary bike and car racer who made over 140 cross-country speed runs during his career and put his name to the Sea to Shining Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, an illegal cross-country race that was run five times during the 1970s. This was the first in a series of films that was based on the idea of illegal long-distance races, with The Gumball Rally seeing release the same year, and the more successful Cannonball Run and its sequel being released at the start of the 1980s.

Whilst perhaps not as star-studded as the later films, Cannonball still has a large ensemble cast with several cameos that are both credited and un-credited, including Martin Scorsese, Sylvester Stallone, Don Simpson and Roger Corman. David Carradine appears as Coy ‘Cannonball’ Buckman, a race driver who has recently been released from jail where he was sent for killing someone whilst driving drunk. He decides to enter the Trans-America Grand Prix, an illegal road race that travels between Los Angeles and New York City. The racing team Modern Motors has promised a contract to either Coy or his arch-rival Cade Redman (Bill McKinney) so he is determined to win.

Because the race crosses state lines Coy will be in violation of his parole conditions, his parole officer (Veronica Hamel) attempts to stop him and ends up being forced to come along for the ride. Two people who have offered to pay his race expenses are also passengers in his Dodge Charger and there are several other racers in the competition, including a surfer dude played by David’s brother Robert and his girlfriend (played by Belinda Balaski). The race soon descends into a violent destruction derby with many of the competitors meeting grizzly ends. Coy will be challenged in more ways than one and the first to cross the finish line isn’t who you might think. Later films in the genre would tone down the violence and deaths considerably.

This Japanese B2 poster features a unique montage design and was printed for the film’s first release in the country in 1977. Note the miss-spelling of the title as ‘Canonnball’.

This is the art-style Japanese B2 for the 1980 action film The Sea Wolves, which is based on real events that occurred during the Second World War. The story is based on the exploits of ex-members of the Calcutta Light Horse, a cavalry regiment of the British Indian Army that was formed in 1872 and was disbanded a couple of years after the end of WWII. The plot sees British intelligence discovering that a Nazi radio ship is broadcasting the coordinates of allied ships from a harbour in Portuguese Goa, which was neutral during the war, so an all out assault cannot be launched by the Navy because of this.

British Intelligence officers Col. Lewis Pugh (Gregory Peck) and Capt. Gavin Stewart (Roger Moore) lead the operation and covertly enlist retired officer Col. Bill Grice (David Niven) of the Calcutta Light Horse & some of his former soldiers. The gang sneak into Goa and arrange a diversion on the evening of a planned raid, before making their way to the radio ship carrying enough explosives to sink it and put a stop any more transmissions. The film reunited much of the creative team behind an earlier OAPs on a mission film, 1978’s The Wild Geese, including director Andrew V. McLaglen, screenwriter Reginald Rose, producer Euan Lloyd and several of the stars.

This Japanese poster features artwork painted by Seito that is unique to the Japanese campaign. Seito is one of my favourite Japanese artists who was responsible for several fantastic illustrated posters during the 1970s and 1980s. Little is known about the man himself, even in his native country.

To see the other posters I’ve collected by Seito click here.

This is one of two Japanese B2 posters for the release of the 1974 drama The Klansman that marks a low point in the careers of the main participants involved and, in my opinion, deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of film history. British director Terence Young (best known for his work on the first two James Bond films and Thunderball) helms this tale of racial tension in a small Southern town that has a large Ku Klux Klan contingent. Lee Marvin plays the lone Sheriff of the town who has to deal with the fallout when a white woman is raped, apparently by a black man. Tensions are escalated when a lone gunman (played by O.J. Simpson) decides to stir things up with the Klan by shooting white townsfolk with a sniper rifle. Richard Burton plays a local landowner who has long opposed the views of the Klan and harboured black people on his land but he gets drawn into the conflict with deadly consequences.

There are many issues with the film, including a confusing script that was clearly trying to imbue the film with something of a social justice message but bungles it badly. All scenes involving the Klan are cringeworthy and obviously massively politically incorrect. The performances from the two leads are also pretty terrible with Lee Marvin mumbling and drawling through all of his scenes looking like a man who wishes he was elsewhere. Richard Burton also phones his performance in, with an accent that attempts Southern American but ends up sounding altogether wrong, and he also affects a limp in some scenes that disappears in others. Legend has it that the two men were both drunk during the entire shoot and that might explain things. It also doesn’t help that the only version of the film available on home video has been badly cut to remove a lot of the violence and a pivotal rape scene.

This is the style A Japanese B2 poster but I also have the style B that features artwork unique to the Japanese campaign by Seito.

A striking design on this Japanese B2 for the release of the 1974 thriller The Day of the Jackal, which was based on the 1971 novel of the same name by the English author Frederick Forsyth. The story is set in 1962 and focuses on a fictional assassination attempt on France’s then president Charles de Gaulle who had angered many in his own country by deciding to grant independence to the French colony of Algeria. An underground resistance group called the OAS had formed to fight this decision and both the novel and the film start with a real incident in which de Gaulle’s car had been sprayed with machine gun fire, but he had miraculously survived unscathed. In the film the OAS decide to cut their losses and hire a professional assassin. They settle on an Englishman (played by Edward Fox) who decides on the call sign ‘Jackal’.

The film follows The Jackal as he prepares for the assassination by traveling all over Europe to procure identity documents, a special weapon, and other items necessary for the task. The French authorities become aware that someone has been hired for the job and appoint ‘France’s best detective, Lebel (Michael Lonsdale, best known for his role as the villain in Moonraker), to lead the hunt for him. Lebel calls in favours from all over Europe in the hunt and eventually they strike it lucky with enquiries by Scotland Yard in the UK. The film ratchets up the tension as the French authorities close in on The Jackal, but he manages to evade them long enough to line de Gaulle up in his sights. 

The film is almost two and a half hours long but maintains a brisk pace and is certainly thrilling throughout. It makes brilliant use of real locations and the Wikipedia page for the film points out some of the places the production visited. The film was very well critically acclaimed but failed to perform as spectacularly at the box-office as some had hoped, something later blamed on the fact that the lead was the then unknown Fox.

This is one of two styles of Japanese posters for the film and I also have the ‘face’ style, which can be seen here.

Great artwork by a Japanese artist who has signed the work ‘M. Tsuchiya’ features on this B2 for the release of the 1992 action-adventure sequel, Once Upon a Time in China II. Celebrated producer and director Tsui Hark (who also co-wrote the screenplay) would end up helming all 6 films in the OUATIC franchise that ended in 1997 with ‘Once Upon a Time in China and America’. The legendary martial artist Jet Li appeared once more as the Chinese folk hero Wong Fei-hung and Donnie Yen, another celebrated action star, plays one of the main bad guys in the film.

Set during the Qing dynasty at the end of the 19th century, the film sees Wong Fei-hung traveling to Guangzhou with his love interest ’13th Aunt’ (Rosamund Kwan) and apprentice Leung Foon (Siu Chung Mok) to attend a medical seminar. Whilst there he gets caught up in the troubles wrought by the White Lotus Sect an extremely xenophobic group who are against any form of Westernisation or influence in China and have been attacking foreigners and anyone allied to them.

After protecting 13th Aunt from kidnap, Wong then deals with an attack on the seminar, followed by one on a group of school children. Eventually he joins forces with a revolutionary group planning to overthrow the Qing dynasty, who count Westernised doctor Sun Yat-Sen (Tielin Zhang) amongst their number, and attack the White Lotus Sect’s base. Psychotic leader Gao Kung (Xin Xin Xiong) isn’t about to go down without a fight and this is before Wong and the others must confront Yen’s military Commander Nap-lan who is out to crush the revolution.

I’ve struggled to find anything of note about ‘M. Tsuchiya’ so if anyone knows anything about the artist please get in touch and I’ll add the details here.

This is one of two Japanese B2 posters printed for the release (in 1971) of the landmark Swedish drama I Am Curious (Yellow) from the controversial director Vilgot Sjöman. Yellow is a companion film to I Am Curious (Blue) and the pair were originally meant to have been released as one 3.5 hour film. The colours in the titles refer to the Swedish flag. They were part of a series of left wing films that were made after the founding of the Swedish Film Institute in the early 1960s and the attempt, by prominent Swedish cultural figure Harry Schein, to start Sweden’s own flavour of New Wave cinema. 

Filmed in a pseudo-documentary, cinéma vérité style, the film sees Sjöman playing a version of himself, a director who decides to make a film starring his 22-year-old lover Lena Nyman (also playing herself) who is a theatre student interested in social issues. The film within the film is called ‘Lena on the Road’ and sees her leaving the flat she shares with her father and, when not getting involved in socio-political activism with a group of friends, she is shown traveling around Stockholm interviewing people she meets about issues including social classes and gender equality.

Later she meets another man called Börje who she begins a love-affair with but this becomes fraught when she discovers he has hidden the fact that he has another lover and a daughter. After traveling to a country retreat Lena begins meditating, practicing yoga and studying about non-violence, but her lover catches up with her and the pair continue their stormy relationship. Soon after the film within a film begins to break down as the ‘actors’ form a ‘real’ relationship that causes the ‘director’ to get jealous and wrap up shooting.

The film is most notable for its then ground-breaking use of full-frontal shots and scenes of (simulated) sexual intercourse that until then had been confined to sex films and not used in a dramatic context. The film was released in a cut form both in the US, UK and elsewhere but it was in the US that it attracted the most controversy with some states even going so far as banning the film outright on grounds of obscenity (Massachusetts in 1969, later overturned). As is the case with any censorship case brought against a film featuring sex and nudity, the box-office takings were helped greatly as punters flocked to see what the fuss was about. The film was the highest-grossing foreign film in the US for many years afterwards. This article on Vulture.com goes into more detail about the original release.

The other style of Japanese poster features a similarly colourful image but has white text down the side instead of black.

A dynamic photographic montage features on this Japanese B2 for the obscure 1968 action thriller, The Fuller Report. One of a number of films in the Eurospy genre, which were European co-productions (this is Italian and French) of espionage thrillers intended to capitalise on the huge success of the Bond films that began with Dr No in 1962. It’s estimated that there were over 50 films in the genre, with productions from all over Europe, including the UK. Some of the more famous films include those starring Dean Martin as the spy Matt Helm (four films including ‘The Silencers’) and France’s OSS 117 (8 films plus two homage spoofs in 2006 and 2009).

This film stars the American actor Ken Clark (perhaps best known as the character Stewpot in South Pacific) as Dick Worth, a skilled race driver who gets involved in an espionage plot. It’s IMDb page describes the plot thusly:

Ken Clark is a race car driver and a good one. Somehow, he becomes entangled in espionage involving a Russian Ballerina and a secret document called the Fuller Report. Not being any kind of a secret agent, Dick Worth [Clark] has to rely on his quick thinking, catlike reflexes and most of all, his luck to see him through. After all, the powers involved play only one way … for keeps!

The film takes in Stockholm, Zurich and London. Given the paucity of reviews on IMDb it appears to have disappeared from public availability and there are no obvious DVD or blu-ray releases of the film. However, it does seem to be available to stream on the American Amazon Instant service, should you want to see it.

Typically detailed artwork by the British artist Brian Bysouth features on this Japanese poster for the release of the 1978 film Force 10 From Navarone. Created as a sequel to the 1961 film The Guns of Navarone, the film is loosely based on the 1968 novel of the same name by Alistair MacLean. The 17 year gap between films was due to MacLean’s treatment of a sequel to ‘Guns…’, written shortly after the original film was met with box-office success, becoming bogged down in development hell. When it was clear that the production was going nowhere MacLean turned his treatment into a novel. The Producer of ‘Guns…’, Carl Foreman, spent years trying to get the sequel off the ground and eventually succeeded by scraping together a budget from five different international sources. The final screenplay bears little resemblance to MacLean’s novel released a decade earlier.

Because almost two decades had passed since ‘Guns…’, the two actors who had played the leads in that film, Gregory Peck and David Niven, were decided to be too old to convince as the leads and the parts of Miller and Mallory were awarded to Edward Fox and Robert Shaw. Brit director Guy Hamilton, best known for a number of James Bond adventures, including Goldfinger and Diamonds are Forever, was given the task of directing, having impressed with his 1969 WWII film ‘Battle of Britain’.

The story sees the pair tasked with hunting down a traitor from the original mission, a German spy who has infiltrated the Yugoslavian resistance and is masquerading as Captain Lescovar (Franco Nero). They join up with an elite American sabotage unit, known as Force 10, which is led by Colonel Barnsby (Harrison Ford, fresh off the success of Star Wars in 1977) who have a mission to carry out of their own. The crew steal an RAF Lancaster bomber and head towards the mission site but the plane is shot down by German fighters and most of the squad are lost. Miller, Mallory and the remaining soldiers are soon captured and imprisoned by German forces but all is not lost as they have a spy of their own in the ranks, Maritza (Barbara Bach) who helps them to escape and continue their mission. Soon they come across Lescovar and the Partisan army. A plan to destroy a large bridge being used by the German forces unites them together, but the German spy’s double-crossing threatens to jeopardise everything.

Force 10 would prove to be Shaw’s penultimate role as he died a year later during the filming of Avalanche Express. The film was met with less than stellar box-office results and general audience indifference, likely not helped by there being such a large gap between the films.

The artwork on this poster was painted by Brian Bysouth who is one of my favourite poster artists and was responsible for many classic posters from the 1960s to the 1980s, including the final painted poster for a James Bond film, The Living Daylights. In 2012 I was fortunate to meet and interview Brian for this site and the article can be read here. The other posters I’ve collected by Brian can be seen by clicking here.

The artwork was reused around the world with the original title, painted to resemble part of the dam, redrawn depending on the language required. The results page for Force 10 on emovieposter.com shows some of these alternative versions, including those for the French and Italian releases. Interestingly this Japanese poster features the title printed down the left hand side, rather than painted onto the dam.

Note that there is an alternative style of poster for the film, the artwork of which can be seen here, that also features the dam bursting and is, I’m fairly certain, erroneously credited to Brian on emovieposter. If anyone has any ideas who the artist of that version is please get in touch or leave a comment below.

This is the Japanese poster for the release of The Anderson Tapes, a 1971 crime film from director Sidney Lumet. It stars Sean Connery and was released the same year as Diamonds are Forever, the film that marked the final time he would officially play James Bond (for Eon Productions). It’s based on a novel of the same name by Lawrence Sanders and had a screenplay written by Frank Pierson who was a producer as well as a screenwriter. Lumet and Pierson would later collaborate on the classic Dog Day Afternoon in 1975.

Connery plays the role of John “Duke” Anderson, a serial burglar who has just been released from prison and reunites with his girlfriend Ingrid (Dyan Cannon) who lives in a high-class apartment block in Manhattan. Far from being reformed, Duke decides he will target all of the flats in the block in one big heist with the help of his mafia connections and a crew of assorted criminals. Things have changed since he was put away and Duke must contend with the electronic surveillance throughout the building as well as various forms of snooping that are covering his entire crew. The film was one of several released at the start of the 1970s that dealt with the issue of surveillance, including the brilliant The Conversation.

This Japanese poster features artwork originally found on the US one sheet, although it appears to have been colour-tinted somewhat, particularly the masked men at the top. If anyone has any ideas who the artist is please get in touch.

This is the Japanese B2 poster for the release of the 1973 crime caper Harry in Your Pocket, which marked the directorial debut of Bruce Geller. A man of many talents, Geller was at various points a screenwriter, producer, lyricist and director. He started out writing scripts for various TV shows during the 1950s and later worked as a co-producer on the successful cowboy series Rawhide. During this period he conceived of a series based around the world of espionage and developed it into what would become Mission Impossible, a TV series that Geller executive-produced (and even appeared in) to great success. The show lasted for seven seasons (though not all had Geller’s involvement) and was shown around the world from 1966 to 1973.

Harry in Your Pocket was Geller’s first feature film as director and The Savage Bees (1976) was his last, although technically that started life as a TV movie. Sadly he died aged 47 when his light aircraft crashed in fog near Santa Barbara, California.

The late James Coburn stars as the eponymous character, a professional pickpocket who works with an older man Casey (Walter Pidgeon) who has started to make mistakes due to excessive drug use. A younger man named Ray (Michael Sarrazin) yearns to be as good as Harry and when his girlfriend Sandy (Trish Van Devere) falls victim to the professional pair, Ray decides to track them down and persuade them to take him under their wing. Harry and Casey eventually agree to let the pair work with them as the ‘stalls’, which means their task is create as much of a distraction as possible so that Harry and Casey can get close to their marks and make ‘the dip’. However, when it becomes clear that Harry has an interest in Sandy, and Ray tires of being only a minor member of the team, the group’s allegiances are tested, putting them all in danger from the law.

A bizarre design features on this Japanese B2 for the release of the fifth entry in the much-loved horror franchise, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5. The film’s subtitle ‘the Dream Child’ hints at the plot for the film, which sees Freddy attempting to return from hell by using the mind of an unborn baby. The child belongs to Alice (Lisa Wilcox) who was the main character in the previous film and the father is her boyfriend Dan (Danny Hassel) who also returns from Part 4. The Dream Child was only the second film directed by Stephen Hopkins, the Jamaican-born English-Australian director best known for helming Predator 2 and the 1998 reboot of Lost in Space.

Set a year after the previous film, the story sees Alice and her friends graduating from high school with Freddy Krueger seemingly vanquished for good. Alice begins to have strange dreams in which she finds herself in the asylum where Freddy’s mother, a nun named Amanda, was attacked and raped by the inmates. Later she has another dream in which she witnesses Amanda giving birth to a strange, deformed baby. The creature scuttles off and ends up in the church where Alice vanquished Freddy in Part 4 whereupon it grows into an adult Krueger. He immediately begins to taunt Alice, claiming he has found a way to return for good. When she wakes from the dream she immediately summons Dan to her but he falls asleep at the wheel of his motorbike and Freddy attacks and, during a gruesome sequence, melds him together with the bike before crashing him into a truck. Soon afterwards she learns that she is pregnant with Dan’s child and immediately begins to fear for its safety.

Alice and her friends must once again battle together with the spirit of Amanda Krueger to stop Freddy before he is able to return and take over the mind of Alice’s unborn son (Jacob). To be honest, the film gets very confusing and it’s hard to follow what’s happening most of the time, never mind how an unborn baby suddenly becomes a ten-year-old child in some of the sequences. The usual dream deaths are pretty dark and there are some gruesome moments for horror hounds, but the story barely hangs together, with choppy editing and hammy acting not helping at all. Although not a box-office disaster, the film failed to make anywhere near the box-office of Part 3 and 4 and audiences were certainly cooling towards the franchise by this point.

The smiling boy depicted on this poster doesn’t appear in the film and my guess is that he was chosen for a photoshoot by the poster’s designer. I’m not sure who was responsible for the artwork of the cartoon Freddy characters so if anyone has an idea please get in touch.

This is one of two Japanese B2 posters printed for the release (in 1971) of the landmark Swedish drama I Am Curious (Yellow) from the controversial director Vilgot Sjöman. Yellow is a companion film to I Am Curious (Blue) and the pair were originally meant to have been released as one 3.5 hour film. The colours in the titles refer to the Swedish flag. They were part of a series of left wing films that were made after the founding of the Swedish Film Institute in the early 1960s and the attempt, by prominent Swedish cultural figure Harry Schein, to start Sweden’s own flavour of New Wave cinema. 

Filmed in a pseudo-documentary, cinéma vérité style, the film sees Sjöman playing a version of himself, a director who decides to make a film starring his 22-year-old lover Lena Nyman (also playing herself) who is a theatre student interested in social issues. The film within the film is called ‘Lena on the Road’ and sees her leaving the flat she shares with her father and, when not getting involved in socio-political activism with a group of friends, she is shown traveling around Stockholm interviewing people she meets about issues including social classes and gender equality.

Later she meets another man called Börje who she begins a love-affair with but this becomes fraught when she discovers he has hidden the fact that he has another lover and a daughter. After traveling to a country retreat Lena begins meditating, practicing yoga and studying about non-violence, but her lover catches up with her and the pair continue their stormy relationship. Soon after the film within a film begins to break down as the ‘actors’ form a ‘real’ relationship that causes the ‘director’ to get jealous and wrap up shooting.

The film is most notable for its then ground-breaking use of full-frontal shots and scenes of (simulated) sexual intercourse that until then had been confined to sex films and not used in a dramatic context. The film was released in a cut form both in the US, UK and elsewhere but it was in the US that it attracted the most controversy with some states even going so far as banning the film outright on grounds of obscenity (Massachusetts in 1969, later overturned). As is the case with any censorship case brought against a film featuring sex and nudity, the box-office takings were helped greatly as punters flocked to see what the fuss was about. The film was the highest-grossing foreign film in the US for many years afterwards. This article on Vulture.com goes into more detail about the original release.

The other style of Japanese poster features a similarly colourful image but has black text down the side instead of white – see here.

This is the style A Japanese B2 poster for the release of the 1979 musical oddity Roller Boogie, featuring artwork by Yasuo Nemoto. One of those films that’s something of a time capsule, the film was put into production by Irwin Yablans the independent producer who had struck gold a year earlier with John Carpenter’s Halloween. Yablans is credited with the film’s story and the intention was to capitalise on the then craze for rollerskating that was sweeping the States.

 Mark L. Lester (known for Commando and Class of 1984) was hired to direct and Linda Blair (The Exorcist) was given the starring role opposite an award-winning amateur skating champion called Jim Bray who was originally attached as a stuntman but was later given acting lessons when the production struggled to find a leading actor.

Blair plays Terry Barkley a Beverly Hills rich girl who is largely ignored by her parents who are determined to see her attend a prestigious school in New York and carry on as a flautist. One day whilst visiting Venice Beach she meets a hotshot skater named Bobby James (Bray) who dreams of making it to the Olympics. The pair strike up a friendship and eventually Terry asks Bobby if she can teach him how to skate and create a routine for them both so they can compete in a Roller Boogie contest at a skating rink called Jammer’s. Unfortunately a nefarious property developer plans to buy Jammer’s and raze it to the ground, so the pair team up with other skaters to put a stop to the plans whilst practicing their routines ready for the big night.

The film was largely panned on its release but found success with teen audiences and has since gone on to have something of a cult following. Plans for a mooted sequel were scrapped when disco music and roller skating lost their popularity.

The artwork is credited to someone called Yasuo Nemoto but I’ve been unable to find out anything about them online. If anyone has any further details about Nemoto please get in touch. I also have the style B Japanese B2 in the collection and it can be viewed here.

Cotton Comes to Harlem is often considered to be one of the first films in the so-called blaxploitation sub-genre of exploitation that was popular during the 1970s. The film was the second film to be directed by the late Ossie Davis, who was one of a handful of African-American actors to achieve commercial success in films without being stereotyped in films prior to 1970. Although best known as an actor, with roles in films like The Hill (1965) and The Scalphunters (1968), Davis tried his hand at directing, starting with the little-seen Kongi’s Harvest in 1970. The same year, ‘Cotton…’ proved to be a huge hit and saw him helm two other blaxploitation pictures, with Black Girl following in 1972 and then another hit with Gordon’s War a year later.

The film is based on the novel of the same name by Chester Himes and is set in the eponymous neighbourhood of Manhattan. Two detectives, Grave Digger Jones (Godfrey Cambridge, who died tragically aged 43) and Coffin Ed Johnson (Raymond St. Jacques) are assigned to investigate the apparent armed robbery of $87000 during a public rally. The gathering was being led by Reverend Deke O’Malley (Calvin Lockhart) who is fundraising for a Back-to-Africa movement ship to be called Black Beauty. A gang of thieves wearing masks appear at the event and steal the money from an armoured truck before making off. A chase ensues and the titular bale of cotton falls from the getaway van. The detectives soon realise that the stolen money was apparently stashed inside the bale and the hunt is on after it disappears from the street. O’Malley must fend off the angry mob of locals looking for their money, as well as a jealous girlfriend (Judy Pace) and the partner who he was in cahoots with to stage the robbery.

The film was a huge hit in cinemas, grossing over $5 million on a $1 million budget and triggering a rush to produce films in a similar vein. Arguably the sub-genre’s most famous film, Shaft, would follow a year later. ‘Cotton…’ was given a sequel called Come Back, Charleston Blue in 1972, but the second film wasn’t met with as much critical or audience adulation.

This Japanese B2 is a photo montage but at least part of it is inspired by the US theatrical poster, which had been painted by the artist Robert McGinnis and can be seen here.

This is the Japanese poster for the release of the 1975 British film, Paper Tiger. The film was directed by Ken Annakin, who’s best know for helming the 1965 war film Battle of the Bulge and some live-action Disney films during the 1970s. The cast featured two acting legends in David Niven (The Pink Panther, The Guns of Navarone) and Toshirô Mifune (multiple Akira Kurosawa classics, including The Seven Samurai). Niven stars as ‘Major’ Walter Bradbury, a seemingly well-educated, ex-military man who has been invited to Malaysia to tutor the son of the Japanese ambassador (Mifune) called Koichi (Ando in his only film role).

Bradbury begins teaching the boy and regales him with tales of derring-do from his time serving during World War II, with the pair becoming fast friends. Unfortunately a group of political terrorists swipe the pair and intend to use them as a bargaining chip in the release of a group of prisoners who have been held for months by the government. The pair must try to stay alive and alert the ambassador to their location. The truth about Bradbury’s life becomes clear but he is given the chance to live up to his fabricated legend. The film takes a while to get going but the use of outdoor locations keeps things interesting and it goes out with a bit of a bang. Niven is eminently watchable although it’s not hard to see why Ando never acted again. Frustratingly, Mifune is given little do and spends a lot of the film standing next to a desk.

The trailer can be viewed here.

Unique artwork features on this Japanese B2 for the release of the fifth entry in the much-loved horror franchise, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5. The film’s subtitle ‘the Dream Child’ hints at the plot for the film, which sees Freddy attempting to return from hell by using the mind of an unborn baby. The child belongs to Alice (Lisa Wilcox) who was the main character in the previous film and the father is her boyfriend Dan (Danny Hassel) who also returns from Part 4. The Dream Child was only the second film directed by Stephen Hopkins, the Jamaican-born English-Australian director best known for helming Predator 2 and the 1998 reboot of Lost in Space.

Set a year after the previous film, the story sees Alice and her friends graduating from high school with Freddy Krueger seemingly vanquished for good. Alice begins to have strange dreams in which she finds herself in the asylum where Freddy’s mother, a nun named Amanda, was attacked and raped by the inmates. Later she has another dream in which she witnesses Amanda giving birth to a strange, deformed baby. The creature scuttles off and ends up in the church where Alice vanquished Freddy in Part 4 whereupon it grows into an adult Krueger. He immediately begins to taunt Alice, claiming he has found a way to return for good. When she wakes from the dream she immediately summons Dan to her but he falls asleep at the wheel of his motorbike and Freddy attacks and, during a gruesome sequence, melds him together with the bike before crashing him into a truck. Soon afterwards she learns that she is pregnant with Dan’s child and immediately begins to fear for its safety.

Alice and her friends must once again battle together with the spirit of Amanda Krueger to stop Freddy before he is able to return and take over the mind of Alice’s unborn son (Jacob). To be honest, the film gets very confusing and it’s hard to follow what’s happening most of the time, never mind how an unborn baby suddenly becomes a ten-year-old child in some of the sequences. The usual dream deaths are pretty dark and there are some gruesome moments for horror hounds, but the story barely hangs together, with choppy editing and hammy acting not helping at all. Although not a box-office disaster, the film failed to take anywhere near the box-office of Part 3 and 4 and audiences were certainly cooling towards the franchise by this point.

This artwork is a modified take on the photographic image of Freddy with the pram seen on the German A1 poster. I’m not sure who was responsible for the painting so if anyone has any ideas please get in touch. The small illustrated figure in the bottom right is actually from the alternate style Japanese B2 poster which I also have in the collection here.

This is the Japanese B2 poster (style A) for the release of Tobe Hooper’s sequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Set and released 13 years after the groundbreaking original film, the story was written by Hooper and the film was this time produced by the notorious schlock-peddlers Cannon Films. The film is set in another part of Texas and sees a radio disc-jockey, Vanita ‘Stretch’ Brock (Caroline Williams), become the target of the psychotic ‘family’ seen in the first film. At the start of the film a pair of jocks are killed by Leatherface (Bill Johnson) after they play chicken with the car that he and Chop-Top (Bill Moseley) are in.

By coincidence, the pair were on a call to Stretch’s radio station and the attack is recorded by her. After she replays the tape live on air the patriarch of the family, The Cook (Jim Siedow), hears it and sends Leatherface and Chop-Top after her. When Leatherface decides to spare Stretch, she follows the pair back to their hideout in an old amusement park and soon ends up in their clutches again. Luckily, a former Texas Ranger called Lieutentant ‘Lefty’ Enright (Dennis Hopper in a role he later said was his worst) has been on the trail of the murderous family and sets out to rescue Stretch and put an end to their reign of terror.

The film was a success at the US box-office and an even bigger hit on home video. It was never actually released at the cinema in the UK as the BBFC demanded cuts totalling over 20 minutes, so Cannon decided not to bother with a release. The film is apparently still banned in Germany and Singapore and heavily edited in other countries. It’s fairly different in tone than the original film and falls short of the raw, brutal quality of the original. Hooper decided to inject more black humour into the script and it’s fair to say that, although not short on gore, the film strikes something of a lighter tone than the original.

This Japanese B2 features bold, striking text and Leatherface surrounded by scenes from the film. It’s montage style that is seen on several Japanese posters from the 1980s.

A striking design features on this Japanese B2 for the release of the 1978 psychological horror, Magic. The film’s screenplay was written by the celebrated novelist, playwright and screenwriter William Goldman. It’s based on the novel of the same name that Goldman had written and released two years earlier, and the producer Joseph E. Levine paid $1m for the rights. Levine hired Richard Attenborough to direct, with whom he’d just completed the war epic A Bridge Too Far. Then the actor Anthony Hopkins, a collaborator of both producer and director (including their last film), was brought onboard to play the lead character.

Hopkins plays Charles “Corky” Withers, a man determined to make a career out of being stage magician. We first see him flop with an act that involves card tricks performed in front of a disinterested audience. The film then jumps a year and Corky has found great success by involving a ventriloquist dummy into his act. A powerful agent called Ben Greene (Burgess Meredith) plans to make an even bigger success of Corky’s act by getting him a slot on prime time TV. However, no one realises that Corky is mentally unstable and his dummy, named Fats, is gaining control over his master.

When it’s suggested that he undergo a medical check to prepare for the TV show, Corky escapes the city and heads to the Catskills mountains where he grew up. There he rekindles a friendship he had with a high school crush called Peggy (Ann-Margret) who is trapped in a loveless marriage with Corky’s old friend Duke (Ed Lauter). Corky begins to relax and is relieved to be away from the pressure of his act, but when Greene appears to convince him to get help to treat his condition, things go awry and Fats acts to protect ‘himself’ with fatal consequences.

The film was a critical success and Hopkins received award nominations for his performance, whilst Goldman won an award for his screenplay in 1979.

The design on this poster is unique to the Japanese market and the B1 version of the poster is nearly identical. The close-up of Fats the dummy at the bottom of the poster was the main image used in the US and UK to promote the film.

This is the Japanese B2 poster for the release of Luc Besson‘s 1985 comedy drama Subway. It followed on from the director’s first film, The Last Battle, which was released two years earlier. Subway reunited him with several of the actors and crew from that film, including Jean Reno, who who would go on to feature in many of Besson’s directorial efforts. French-American actor Christopher Lambert appears in the lead role of Fred, a grifter who steals documents from a rich businessman and escapes into the Paris Metro.

Lambert stars alongside Isabelle Adjani who appears as Héléna, the frustrated wife of the businessman from whom Fred has stolen the documents. The film is set largely on location in the Metro and makes great use of the halls, concourses and even the areas usually off-limits to the public. After being locked in overnight, Fred begins to explore and eventually meets Le Roller (Jean-Hugues Anglade), a petty thief who has made a home in an abandoned storage room. Le Roller introduces Fred to the other characters who called the underground their home, including the musclebound Big Bill (Christian Gomba) and The Florist (Richard Bohringer). 

The admittedly slight plot sees Fred continue to evade a bunch of hired goons sent by the businessman, as well as the subway police. The commissioner (a great performance by Michel Galabru) gets increasingly frustrated as his men, including one he’s nicknamed Batman (Jean-Pierre Bacri) fail to catch Le Roller time and time again. Héléna becomes increasingly infatuated with Fred, eventually realising his carefree attitude is the perfect antidote the marriage she feels trapped in. The film features a typically great score by regular Besson collaborator Éric Serra who also appears in the film as a member of a band that Fred brings together. The film was a success with critics as well as the French box-office. A year later Lambert would star in Highlander, a film that shot him to international stardom and lead to him winning multiple Hollywood roles.

This Japanese poster features the same artwork that was used on the French poster. It appears that the Japanese designer simply took a copy of a French poster, including all the flaws which that particular copy had. If you look closely at some of the images you can see hairs, scratches and other blemishes that must have been present on the poster. The artwork is credited to an artist called Bernard Bernhardt about whom I’ve been able to discover very little. Some of his other film posters can be seen on Cinematerial. According to this translated interview he was born in Paris in 1950 and worked on posters for several famous directors, including Roman Polanski and Michael Mann, over a thirty year period.

This is the Japanese B1 poster for the release of Hal Ashby‘s 1979 comedy-drama Being There. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Jerzy Kosiński, who was also involved in the initial effort to craft the screenplay, with an uncredited Robert C. Jones. Being There was the penultimate film for the legendary British comedy actor Peter Sellers who would pass away only a year after its release at the untimely age of 54.

Sellers plays Chance, a simple-minded gardener who has lived and worked in the same Washington DC house since he was a young boy. He has never left the house, is unable to read or write and everything he has learnt has come from the TV set in his bedroom. When the owner of the house passes away, Chance is forced to wander the streets wearing the tailored suit of his old employer, unsure what to do next. An accidental encounter with the Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine), the wife of the elderly billionaire business mogul Ben Rand (Melvyn Douglas), sees him transported in a limousine to the sprawling residence of the Rands. There he meets Ben who mistakenly assumes him to be Chauncey Gardener, a cultured and wise gentleman, who endears himself to the mogul. Rand mistakes his simple proclamations about gardening to be deep metaphors about the state of the economy. Chance even meets the President (Jack Warden), a friend of Rand’s, and influences a major speech he makes. Eventually people around Rand and the President begin to investigate Chauncey Gardener’s background, whilst Ben Rand’s health begins to fail and Eve becomes smitten with Chance.

The film was a critical success and was award-winning, with Sellers being given the Golden Globe for Best Actor (Musical or Comedy) and Melvyn Douglas snagging the Best Supporting Actor at the 1980 Academy Awards. The Rand’s home was the incredible Biltmore Estate in North Carolina.

The artwork on this Japanese B1 also featured on an international one sheet and the the German poster. I’m unsure who is responsible for the art so if anyone has any ideas please get in touch.

This is the original cinema program that was sold at Japanese screenings of Steven Spielberg’s classic 1975 horror, Jaws. The instantly recognisable image was painted by the American artist Roger Kastel and was originally commissioned for the paperback cover of Peter Benchley’s novel, but when Universal saw the artwork they bought the rights to use it for the poster and following the worldwide success of the film it would go onto become one of the most imitated and parodied images of all time, as well as a merchandising product in its own right. Kastel also painted the ‘Gone with the Wind’ style one sheet for The Empire Strikes Back. Check out his official site here.

I also have the original US one sheet which can be seen on my site here.

Note that this program features images of and details about the production, the director and several of the actors. It also includes a hand-written message especially for Japanese ‘movie buffs’.

The enigmatic artist Seito is responsible for the artwork on this Japanese B1 poster for the original release of the sci-fi classic Star Wars in Japan. The design has clear echoes of the American one sheet artwork by Tom Jung but features several additions and the unusual choice of having the Death Star upside down (the weapon crater at least). Both designs depict an overly muscled Luke Skywalker and a tight-clothed, voluptuous Princess Leia, which, if you’ve seen the film (who hasn’t!), you’ll know doesn’t quite match up with the actual characters.

This is one of three posters printed for the original release of Star Wars in Japan, which included a simple advance and this photo montage style.

Seito is one of my favourite Japanese artists and is responsible for some wonderful illustrated posters, although little is known about him even in his native Japan. To see the other posters I’ve collected by him click here.