A relatively obscure spy thriller from 1967, A Man Called Dagger saw limited release around the globe and, as far as I can tell, this Japanese poster is one of the few examples of a theatrical release (I don’t believe the UK was treated to a cinema outing). Originally filmed in 1966, it fell victim to a collapse of relations between its original production company, Lew Horwitz’s Global Screen Associates (GSA), and distributors Cinema Distributors of America. It languished for almost a year before being picked up by MGM. The film is essentially a low-grade James Bond homage (the original title was ‘Why Spy?’) and it’s clear that the original producers wanted to cash in on the global popularity of Ian Fleming’s famous creation.

Richard Rush (most known for 1980’s The Stunt Man) was at the helm and Paul Mantee (a cult figure from his performance in Robinson Crusoe on Mars, 1964) plays the unfortunately monikered Dick Dagger (isn’t that a weapon from David Fincher’s Seven?), a crime-fighting spy who teams up with female agent Harper Davis (Terry Moore) in a bid to track down wheelchair bound Nazi war criminal Rudolph Koffman (Jan Murray). Koffman is holed up in a meat-packing plant and is using less than legal supplies in its production. With several damsels in distress, including Harper, Dagger must his ingenuity and gadgets, including a dodgy laser watch to save the day.

This B2 poster is a combination of the original US one sheet artwork (artist unknown) and a few photographic stills. If you have any idea who is responsible for the artwork please get in touch.

Check out the original trailer on YouTube.

One of two werewolf themed horrors to be released in 1981, Joe Dante‘s The Howling beat John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London to cinemas by a few months, but both would go on to be cult classics of the genre, even if the latter film won more critical plaudits at the time of its release. Despite hugely different storylines each film features a memorable werewolf transformation scene and The Howling’s one was created by noted practical effects specialist Rob Bottin (The Thing, Robocop), which was his first solo effort away from his mentor Rick Baker. Although he had initially started work on The Howling, Baker had decided to leave the production to work on Landis’ film and handed the reigns over to Bottin. The results are definitely impressive and were certainly groundbreaking for the time, however Baker’s handiwork on AWIL is unforgettable and impressed the judges of the Academy Awards so much that he won the Outstanding Achievement in Makeup in its inaugural year.

Very loosely based on the novel of the same name by Gary Brandner, The Howling’s script was worked on by two screenwriters before Dante brought in John Sayles, with whom he collaborated on 1978’s Piranha to write a third draft. The film begins as the investigative TV report Karen White (Dee Wallace) is on her way to meet the serial murderer Eddie Quist (Robert Picardo) at a sleazy LA porn store as part of a police sting operation. After entering a booth, Karen is surprised by Eddie who is standing behind her and forces her to watch a porno of a young woman being attacked. Karen turns to look at Eddie and her screams attract nearby police officers who shoot and apparently kill him. Severely traumatised by the event and suffering from hallucinatory flashbacks, Karen’s therapist Dr Waggner (Patrick Macnee) refers her to a secluded retreat on the Californian coast called The Colony.

Karen travels there with her boyfriend Bill played by the late Christopher Stone, who was Dee Wallace’s boyfriend at the time and later married her (Stone sadly passed away from a heart attack in 1995), and the pair are welcomed by the residents of the camp, which is made up of several log cabins in a forest near the coast. One night Bill is out for a walk and is attacked and bitten by a werewolf, which is actually Marsha Quist (Elisabeth Brooks) a sultry nymphomaniac who has been at the Colony for months. Later she accosts Bill and the pair make love in the forest as they transform into werewolves together. Karen suspects all is not right and invites her friend Teri (Belinda Balaski), another reporter who is looking into Eddie Quist and has discovered that his body is missing from the morgue, out to visit her. Soon after arriving Teri is attacked and killed by Eddie whom she watches transform into a wolf (with Rob Bottin’s help) and before long Karen discovers the true secret of the Colony. Teri’s partner Chris (Dennis Dugan) comes to Karen’s rescue clutching a rifle loaded with silver bullets.

The film was made on a low budget (circa $1m) and was a commercial success around the globe, making tens of millions of dollars. It inevitably spawned a number of significantly less interesting sequels, starting with 1985’s ‘Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf’. Joe Dante believes that Steven Spielberg saw the film at the cinema and subsequently offered him the directorial job on the cult classic Gremlins (1984).

Despite The Howling’s relatively high profile I’ve been unable to identify the artist responsible for the artwork on this US one sheet, which was also used as the marketing art in several other countries. If anyone has any ideas please get in touch. Note that this particular poster is discoloured somewhat as it is meant to be more orange/yellow in tone, and I believe it’s the result of an error during printing. It’s not the first one sheet for the Howling that I’ve seen with this discolouration and at least three can be seen in emovieposter’s past sales history of the poster. I suspect that a batch of the posters fell victim to an issue with blue/green inks at the time of printing.

A classic design by the great Bill Gold on this one sheet for Magnum Force, the second entry in the Dirty Harry franchise starring acting legend Clint Eastwood. The follow up to the 1971 original, this entry saw ‘Dirty’ Harry Callahan face off against a group of vigilante cops who have taken the law into their own hands and are bumping off criminals who manage to escape conviction. The film was helmed by Ted Post who had previously directed Eastwood in the TV series Rawhide and in his hit Western Hang ‘Em High (1968).

Bill Gold has had a working relationship with Eastwood that has lasted over four decades. He worked on the iconic one sheet for Dirty Harry and went on to design the American poster for every Eastwood film since, which includes the brilliant one for Clint’s last Western, Unforgiven (1992). Gold has also designed posters for some of Hollywood’s greatest directors, including the likes of Stanley Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange, with artwork by Philip Castle) and Alfred Hitchcock (Dial M For Murder).

Born in New York City in 1921, Gold studied illustration and design at the Pratt Institute before starting his professional design career in 1941 in the publicity department for Warner Brothers. One of his earliest designs was for the classic Humphrey Bogart film Casablanca and within a few years he went on to become the head of the studio’s poster department. In 1962 he started Bill Gold Advertising in New York and then spent the next four decades creating hundreds of memorable poster designs and collaborating with some of the best illustrators in the business, including the brilliant Bob Peak.

Gold started to design less posters towards the end of the 1990s, with only a handful of posters for Eastwood films being credited to him. His last poster was for the 2011 film J. Edgar (directed by Eastwood), which Gold agreed to work on after an unsuccessful period of retirement following the poster he worked on for Mystic River in 2003. He continues to live in Upstate New York and in 2011 a book was released to coincide with his 90th birthday called Bill Gold Posterworks, which features 450 pages worth of his incredible designs and details his creative process. Unfortunately, it has an eye-watering price tag that has prevented me picking a copy up but I hope that one day a more affordable version will be released.

To see the other posters I’ve collected that were designed by Gold click here.

A unique montage features on this Japanese style B poster for the release of the 1981 fantasy adventure Clash of the Titans, which features several characters from Greek mythology. The film is perhaps most notable for being the last feature film for which celebrated stop motion artist Ray Harryhausen provided creature effects, and he effectively retired following its release. The story follows the machinations of Greek gods and their charges on earth as Perseus (poodle-haired, square-jawed Harry Hamlin), son of Zeus (Laurence Olivier), triggers the wrath of the sea goddess Thetis (Maggie Smith) after he tries to woo the gorgeous Princess Andromeda (Judi Bowker).

Unbeknownst to Perseus, Andromeda was in a relationship with Thetis’ son Calibos before Zeus had punished him for various corrupt deeds by turning him into a half-beast creature and banishing him from civilised society. Perseus must undergo a series of trials to successfully win the hand of Andromeda and things take a turn for the worse when he is able to successfully answer a riddle that had seen previous suitors burned at the steak. Thetis once again intervenes, demanding that Andromeda be sacrificed to the titan Kraken or risk the total destruction of the city of Joppa. Perseus sets out once again to discover a way to stop the Kraken and save Andromeda from certain death.

This B2 features elements from the two US one sheets printed for the film – the Kraken attack is from Dan Goozee’s style B one sheet, whilst the orange Pegasus is from the Brothers Hildebrandt’s awesome advance one sheet. The style A Japanese B2 is also in the Film on Paper collection and can be seen here.

I’ll admit to not having seen John Frankenheimer’s film about a war between two rival crime gangs and the hitman (the late Richard Harris) who is caught between them. From reading various reviews and articles online it seems like the film is trapped between genres; it was intended as a black comedy but apparently features many scenes of over-the-top violence and the humour often falls flat. This quote from an IMDb review gives you some idea:

The substandard mafia plot sits second tier to the film’s sporadic comedy spoofing and mugging, much of what both fails and succeeds simultaneously at the hands of its dramatic director who must have been at the peek of his well publicized cocaine binge.

It certainly sounds like an interesting film (one reviewer describes it as a ‘beautiful mistake’) and I intend to check it out soon because Shout Factory, a US DVD label, are releasing the film in a double-bill with another 1974 film The Nickel Ride this week.

The title is definitely an odd one and is apparently referencing the advertising slogan (at the time) of Ivory Soap, a popular brand of cleaning product that is still available today. Here’s a none-more-1970s advert that features the tagline. The name was obviously simplified at a certain point as it’s now known as ‘Call Harry Crown’ on IMDb.

This US 30×40 poster was designed by the great Bill Gold and features a Roy Lichtenstein-esque pop-art image. I’m not sure who is responsible for the artwork but it’s possible it could be John Van Hamersveld who illustrated the awesome Get Carter pop-art style one sheet. If anyone knows this for sure I’d appreciate the confirmation so leave a comment or send me an email.

This pop-art inspiration also extended to the opening sequence that can be watched here.

The original trailer is on YouTube.

David Lynch‘s brilliant The Straight Story is an uncharacteristically warm and natural film, quite unlike anything else in the director’s filmography, although it still features unmistakably Lynchian touches. The plot is based on the true story of elderly World War II veteran Alvin Straight who, unable to obtain a driver’s licence, travelled over 240 miles on a sit-down lawnmower to visit his brother who had suffered a stroke. Richard Farnsworth, a former stuntman turned character actor, played Alvin in a oscar-nominated performance, and Sissy Spacek featured as his mentally disabled daughter Rose. Legendary actor Harry Dean Stanton appears as Alvin’s brother. Farnsworth was suffering from terminal cancer at the time he made the film and he sadly took his own life only months after filming had wrapped.

This Japanese poster features a unique design with a profile shot of Alvin riding the tractor at night underneath a hand-scrawled title. The film is frustratingly unavailable on blu-ray at the moment but I hold out hope that Disney will see fit to release it sometime soon.

Cult Canadian director David Cronenberg’s Videodrome was released with this unique poster design when it hit Japanese cinemas in 1985. Like much of the director’s output, Videodrome is definitely not for the faint of heart and contains some utterly unforgettable moments of Cronenberg’s patented body-horror mutations. James Woods stars as Max Renn the sleazy CEO of a minor cable TV station who is constantly on the lookout for cheap exploitation fare to broadcast. Renn is told about Videodrome, a new and mysterious signal apparently being broadcast out of Malaysia which purports to depict real ‘snuff’ movies of victims being tortured and killed.

Renn decides to start pirating the show and broadcasting it to his audience. This soon attracts widespread attention that puts him into contact with sadomasochistic psychiatrist Nicki Brand (Debby Harry) and Professor Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley). When he discovers that the signal is actually being broadcast out of Pittsburgh, Renn decides to investigate further and he plunges into a nightmarish conspiracy that goes deeper than he ever imagined. As the American tagline says ‘First it controls your mind. Then it destroys your body’. Fans of Cronenberg’s proclivity for unnatural cavities and the melding of flesh with inorganic substances are not left disappointed, and the gun on this poster hints towards the finale.

In addition to this Japanese poster I also have the American one sheet and the British quad.

A striking design appears on this US one sheet for the release of the 1982 horror film The Sender. The film was the feature debut of Roger Christian, a British man who began his prolific career working as an assistant art decorator on productions for the likes of Hammer Studios. This eventually saw him to working as a set decorator on the UK-based sets of the first Star Wars, for which Roger would go on to win an Academy Award. He collaborated with Ridley Scott as a production designer on Alien (1979) and George Lucas again for Return of the Jedi. After completing a few shorts he helmed The Sender in 1982. His most infamous work is the ill-fated, John Travolta-starring Battlefield Earth, which is widely considered to be one of the worst films ever made.

The sender was written by Thomas Baum (The Manhattan Project) and the plot is described on Wikipedia:

A young man (Zeljko Ivanek, in his motion-picture debut) is admitted to a state mental hospital after he attempts suicide at a public beach by filling the pockets of his clothes with rocks and walking into the water in hopes that he will drown. As he shows no signs of being able to remember even his own name, the doctors call him John Doe #83.

Soon after his arrival, Dr. Gail Farmer (Kathryn Harrold) is assigned to him. But before long, she begins seeing and hearing things around her that have no explanation. Soon she begins to make the terrifying connection the things she has been seeing and hearing have to her amnesiac patient.

The film was apparently given a limited release in the US by Paramount pictures in 1982, but I don’t believe it was given a theatrical release anywhere else in the world. It did subsequently appear on home video in other countries, including the UK.

The poster was designed by Spiros Angelikas who was a prolific designer and artist of film posters during the 1970s and 1980s. He owned a design agency called Spiros Associates. Some of his most famous work includes the poster he designed for Friday the 13th, with artist Alex Ebel, and for his collaborations with the legendary artist Richard Amsel. They worked on Raiders of the Lost Ark and Nijinsky together and there’s a great article on the late artist’s website about their efforts. He also worked on several of the posters for the original Star Trek films, including the gorgeous Bob Peak original. There’s an interesting article by Angelikas’ son Harry on the Trek Core website which has photographs of concepts for the posters by Spiros that never made it to the print stage.

For this poster, not only did Spiros design the layout and type but he also put together the photo montage central image.