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.
Artwork by the brilliant Robert McGinnis on this US one sheet for the 1980 re-release of Woody Allen‘s 1973 sci-fi comedy Sleeper. Allen stars as Miles Monroe, a musician and health store owner who is cryogenically frozen by accident in 1973 and then revived 200 years later to discover that 22nd-century America is now an oppressive police state ruled by a dictator. Monroe falls in with a group of rebels who are trying to infiltrate the government’s top secret Aires Project, and it’s not long before he is on the run from the authorities with a kidnapped socialite Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton) in tow.
One of the director’s earliest and best, in my opinion, the film is a frequently hilarious slapstick adventure that differs greatly from many of his later, more serious and introspective films. Incredibly, Allen was able to complete editing almost 35 hours of footage down to the release running time of two hours; a feat he managed with two days to spare. The film was released with the title ‘Woody and the Robots’ in French-speaking Canada and this led the director to ensure he had a clause in all future contracts that prevented his film titles being changed by third parties.
Robert McGinnis is an American artist and illustrator who is perhaps best known for his work on several James Bond posters, as well the iconic one sheet for the first release of Breakfast at Tiffanys. These and many others can be seen on this website. The other posters I’ve collected by him can be seen here.
The brilliantly bonkers trailer can be seen on YouTube.
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).
