A rare mix of photography and artwork features on this Japanese B2 for the release of (what would later be re-titled) The Streetfighter’s Last Revenge. The final entry in a trilogy of films starring legendary Japanese martial artist Shin’ichi ‘Sonny’ Chiba, the film followed the original The Streetfighter and Return of the Street Fighter which were all produced in one year (1974). The original film was Chiba’s breakout international hit and was released in the USA and elsewhere in 1974, but this sequel would have to wait 5 years before it was given a cinema release in the States. When it did finally arrive it was significantly altered and had large amounts of violence removed.
The reason for the delayed release is likely to do with the drop in quality over the first two entries as this review (and several others) on IMDb testifies:
‘If you love THE STREET FIGHTER (and you probably do if you looked up this entry) don’t even bother with this final entry in the series. This one sucks out loud, and has only one decent fight scene which lasts for about a minute. Our hero now has taken on a more “MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE”-type persona since he now is a master of disguise (???). Skip this.’
This film and the others in the trilogy are now in the public domain (so can be streamed from multiple sources online). Director Quentin Tarantino is a big Chiba fan and these are the films that the character of Clarence (Christian Slater) is watching in a cinema triple-bill when he first meets Alabama (Patricia Arquette) in Tony Scott’s True Romance (Tarantino wrote the script).
I’ve struggled to find out who is responsible for the artwork on this poster so if anyone has an idea please get in touch. The US poster uses the same art and photograph, which was almost never the case, but I suspect that the distributor (New Line) was trying to save money by reusing as much as possible.
Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End is one of those films that leaves a lasting impression on anyone who sees it, but it was sadly considered to be a ‘lost’ film for many years and was practically impossible to see after its initial cinema opening in a handful of countries. The film was briefly available on VHS in the UK but was never released on DVD. In 2011 the BFI restored and re-released it at the cinema and also issued a blu-ray version complete with several extras, which is utterly superb and well worth picking up.
The film focuses on Mike (John Moulder-Brown) a teenager who leaves school and gets his first job working at a local swimming baths. There he meets Susan (Jane Asher) an older woman with whom he quickly becomes infatuated. Without spoiling things too much, the film builds to a fairly shocking climax which has been known to polarize viewers. Jane Asher looks absolutely stunning and really plays the seductive, care-free Susan perfectly – it’s not hard to understand the reasons behind Mike’s infatuation!
Skolimowski was a contemporary of Roman Polanski and was mentored by the great Polish director Andrzej Wajda. He completed several films in Poland throughout the 1960s before moving to the UK where he made Deep End and a couple of other features. He then left to Los Angeles where he took up painting and occasionally acted in films, notably in White Knights and more recently in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises. His 17 year hiatus from directing ended in 2008 with the release of Four Nights with Anna and he made the spartan thriller Essential Killing with Vincent Gallo in 2010.
This poster by an unknown graphic designer is the quad that was printed when the film was given a wider UK release. The premiere showing had actually been at the Academy Cinema One on London’s Oxford Street and the poster for this was done by the legendary designer Peter Strausfeld (his Seven Samurai poster is on this site here).
The original trailer is on YouTube.
A striking illustration by the Polish artist Wiktor Sadowski features on this Polish poster for the release of the Czechoslovakian film End of the Lonely Farm Berghof. Directed by Jirí Svoboda, the film appears to be little-seen, at least judging by the absence of any reviews on its IMDb page and elsewhere. The plot is described on kinosvetozor.cz thusly:
“Based on a novel by Vladimir Korner, Zanik Samoty Berhof takes place just as World War II has ended, and the Germans who live in Sudentenland now find themselves citizens of Czechoslovakia. Hitler annexed that area during the war, and it was simply given back after the war. Rather than peacefully accept the situation, some Germans continued to fight in this northwestern border region, refusing to accept the end of the war. In this story, several of these people end up at the Berhof farm […] When the mayor of the town decides that these “warmongers” have to be handled immediately, the fate of the people on the farm seems bleak indeed.”
Wiktor Sadowski who was born in Olendry in 1956 and later graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Sadowski has painted hundreds of film posters during his career and has won several prestigious awards, including a gold medal at Poster Biennale of Poland in 1984 and a gold medal from the New York Society of Illustrators in 1994. There are multiple galleries of his work online, including this one on the Polish Poster Gallery website and this one on Polishposter.com that both clearly show the quality of his artwork.
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.
This is the UK video poster for the release of the excellent 1985 action-drama Runaway Train. The film was produced by the notorious schlock-peddlers Cannon Films, which at the time was run by two Israeli cousins, the director Menahem Golan and producer Yoram Globus. It’s often cited as one of the best films that Cannon Films ever produced, which makes sense when you look at their filmography (Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo anyone?).
Rather improbably, the first version of the script was written by celebrated Japanese director Akira Kurosawa and he was planning to direct it himself. When the financial backing fell through the script was shelved. It was later picked up and underwent re-writes to prepare it for the Russian director Andrey Konchalovskiy who was a contemporary of Andrei Tarkovsky (and co-wrote Andrei Rublev with him). Konchalovskiy later went on to helm films such as Tango & Cash for US producers.
The film is set in remote Alaska and begins in a high-security prison. Oscar ‘Manny’ Manheim (a memorable turn from Jon Voight) is a notorious bank robber who hatches an escape plan that involves the help of the skittish Buck McGeehy (Eric Roberts). After smuggling Manny into the laundry room, the pair escape through the sewers and eventually find their way to a railroad. There they jump onboard a slowly moving locomotive and hide in one of the cars. Unbeknownst to them, the train driver suffers a heart attack whilst trying to stop the train and falls off it. The automatic train stop is not engaged and the runaway train begins its journey down the tracks. Also onboard is another railway worker called Sara (Rebecca De Mornay) who realises quickly that they’re in a bad predicament. The rest of the film sees the trio attempting to bring the speeding train to a stop whilst being pursued by the sadistic prison warden Ranken (John P. Ryan) and his men.
Runaway Train was a critical and commercial success in the US and abroad. It was also nominated for several awards – an unusual occurrence for a Cannon film (Jon Voight would win a Golden Globe for Best Actor). This video poster was for the 1986 release on MGM home video in the UK and features a unique design that is, I believe, exclusive to the poster. It’s a mixture of artwork and photograph. The trees, train and elements of the background are painted and Jon Voight’s image has also had some painting applied to it as well, strangely.
This one sheet was printed by Janus films for their 2011 re-release of Jean-Luc Godard‘s celebrated 1967 film Weekend (or Le Week End). One of the most anarchic and surreal films ever committed to celluloid, Weekend is a satire which takes aim at, amongst other things, the bourgeois status and money-obsessed French middle-class. The story, such as there is one, focuses on a self-obsessed couple played by Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne who have plotted to murder her parents and collect their inheritance. They set off from their home in the city and travel into the French countryside where they come across all manner of scenes, including fatal car crashes and a (justifiably famous) sequence of a traffic jam which the audience watches them traverse with horns blaring the entire time. Society appears to be crumbling around them as they make their way to the small village where her parents live. Eventually, things take a turn for the deadly when they end up in the clutches of a band of hippie, cannibalistic revolutionaries.
This one sheet was created by the Vancouver-based designer Steve Chow who is a regular collaborator with Janus and its sister company The Criterion Collection (the film was released on disc soon after its cinema outing in 2011). Chow has worked on hundreds of posters, magazines, advertising elements and covers for home video releases of various films. Check out his official website to see a gallery of his work and a short biography about his career so far.
In 2011, the Criterion website featured a short interview with Chow on the creation of this poster and I’ve copied the detail here (in case that page disappears one day):
What was your inspiration for the new poster for Weekend?
That particular image really only works with all the elements intact—cropping was not doing us any favors—so we figured, Why not use it whole? It’s just that in order to do that, we had to turn it sideways. It was a natural choice—and it seemed to fit the film’s unpredictable, violent, and humorous tenor. It’s like, “WTF just happened? Is that a plane? A body? How did that car end up like that?” It’s kind of like the visual punch line to a joke that starts with “two materialistic bourgeois jerks go on a road trip . . .”
Where does your interest in Godard films come from?
Godard’s influence is everywhere—in contemporary advertising, commercials, music videos. You could be watching something that is “Godard” and not even realize it. (Just the other night, I saw a new Mexican film that riffed on Anna Karina’s back-of-the-head introduction in Vivre sa vie.) His 1960s works, in particular, still resonate with so much life and excitement. So daring, and so very, very cool, even decades later.
Do you have a particular approach to designing for them?
With all of these Godard posters, I pretty much tried to just get out of the way and let the image speak for itself, and in the end, the most intuitive options were successful. With Pierrot le fou and Vivre sa vie, the resonance of those particular images is strong; title treatments that are too heavy or that get too much attention wouldn’t help tell their stories. Similarly, for Weekend, we’d have a hard time creating an image or a collage that captured the crazy, chaotic energy and direction of the film as well as the one we ended up using. So, with regards to these three posters, if I never hear “Wow, that’s a killer title treatment!” I’ll consider that a success.
Chow also designed the Janus re-release one sheets for Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou and Vivre Sa Vie and both can be seen in this Mubi.com ‘Movie Poster of the Week’ article.