Above: US poster for Le Sauvage (Jean-Paul Rappeneau, France/Italy, 1975).
Since my column last week on the lesser-known posters of Jean-Luc Godard got so much attention, and since this week the great Catherine Deneuve turned 70 years old, I thought I’d do the same for the grand diva of French cinema. Deneuve—“the most beautiful woman in the world”—has graced well-known posters for numerous masterpieces, whether for Bunuel’s Tristana or Belle de Jour, Demy’s Umbrellas of Cherbourg or Donkey Skin, Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid or Polanski’s Repulsion, and when I was searching for a poster to mark her birthday last Tuesday, these were the films that kept popping up. But Deneuve has been making films for over 50 years and has appeared in over 110 of them so there should be a lot more to choose from. So that is what I want to focus on here to celebrate Ms. Deneuve’s milestone: some of her not-quite masterpieces, her juvenilia, her American adventures, her follies. Because she looks fabulous, hand-drawn or photographed, no matter what the film.
Above: US poster for Hustle (Robert Aldrich, USA, 1975).
Above: US poster for Paroles et Musique (Elie Chouraqui, France/Canada, 1984).
Above: US poster for The April Fools (Stuart Rosenberg, USA, 1969).
Above: US poster for Mayerling (Terence Young, UK/France, 1968).
Above: French grande by Jean Mascii for La Vie de Château (Jean-Paul Rappeneau, France, 1966).
Above: US poster for Si c’était à refaire (Claude Lelouch, France, 1976).
Above: US poster for March or Die (Dick Richards, USA, 1977).
Above: Belgian poster for La Chamade (Alain Cavalier, France, 1968).
Above: Japanese poster for Les Parisiennes (Mark Allegret and others, France, 1962).
Above: Italian poster for Agent Trouble (Jean-Pierre Mocky, France, 1987).
Above: Japanese poster for Hôtel des Amériques (André Téchiné, France, 1981).
Posters courtesy of Heritage Auctions. If anyone has any other lesser-known favorites I’d love to see them.