Movie Poster of the Week: Milos Forman’s "Loves of a Blonde" and "The Firemen’s Ball"

A wide array of international posters for two of the late, great Czech director’s earliest classics.
Adrian Curry

Above: Polish poster for Loves of a Blonde by Hannah Bodnar and a Hungarian poster for The Firemen’s Ball by Peter Merczel.

Milos Forman, who passed away last week at the age of 86, was best known as the Academy Award-winning director of those ’70s and ’80s classics One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, but he was a sensation before he left his native Czechoslovakia in 1968. His first feature, Black Peter (1964), was well received (it took the top prize at Locarno) but it was his two subsequent features, Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Firemen’s Ball (1967), which made his name both at home and abroad and which remain two of the great fire-bursts of the Czech New Wave. Both are social satires set in small Czech towns, filmed on location, using mostly non-professional casts, in a distinctly cinema vérité style. Both were nominated for Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film (Blonde lost to Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman and Firemen to Bondarchuk’s War and Peace) and both, as far as I can tell from the wide array of international posters, were distributed to great acclaim around the world.

The two posters above—Hannah Bodnar’s ethereal Polish artwork for Loves of a Blonde and Peter Merczel’s inspired 1988 matchbox design for The Firemen’s Ball—are two of my all-time favorite film posters, but both films inspired numerous and very varied designs. A lot of them verge on the prurient: sex sold foreign films in the 1960s, and the story has it that when one international distributor told Forman that Loves of a Blonde was too short for American audiences and didn’t contain enough nudity, he shot some additional scenes that were only ever seen abroad. Despite that, it is the decidedly less sexy Firemen’s Ball that has the most salacious posters, especially a couple of German designs and one Danish that look British seaside postcards or posters for a Carry On film. The original Czech posters by Vladimir Bidlo are wonderful in their collage style; I love the French pop art design by Ferracci and, of course, the wonderful Polish poster by Jerzy Flisak.

Below are the best posters I could find for each film, beginning with the original Czech designs and ending with the American one sheets and some US ephemera. If you’ve never seen these films do check them if you can find them—they are wonderful.

Above: Czech poster for Loves of a Blonde. Design by Zedenek Palcr.

Above: Polish poster for Loves of a Blonde. Design by Hannah Bodnar.

Above: Cuban poster for Loves of a Blonde. Design by Eduardo Muñoz Bachs.

Above: German poster for Loves of a Blonde. Artwork by Ahrle.

Above: another German poster for Loves of a Blonde. Design by Hans Peter Sickert.

Above: Italian 2-fogli poster for Loves of a Blonde.

Above: Italian 4-fogli poster for Loves of a Blonde.

Above: French grande for Loves of a Blonde.

Above: UK quad for Loves of a Blonde (known in the UK as A Blonde in Love). Design by Peter Strausfeld.

Above: US one sheet for Loves of a Blonde.

Above: Brochure for US engagement of Loves of a Blonde.

Above: Czech poster for The Firemen’s Ball by Vladimir Bidlo.

Above: another Czech poster for The Firemen’s Ball by Vladimir Bidlo.

Above: Czech half-poster for The Firemen’s Ball. Design by Vladimir Bidlo.

Above: Polish poster for The Firemen’s Ball. Design by Jerszy Flisak.

Above: The French poster for The Firemen’s Ball. Design by Ferracci.

Above: 1988 Hungarian poster for The Firemen’s Ball by Peter Merczel.

Above: Danish poster for The Firemen’s Ball. Artist unknown.

Above: German poster for The Firemen’s Ball.

Above: two very different German posters for The Firemen’s Ball, notably with a different title as if this was a later re-release.

Above: UK quad poster for The Firemen’s Ball.

Above: US half sheet for The Firemen’s Ball.

Above: US one sheet for The Firemen’s Ball.

Above: US subway poster for The Firemen’s Ball.

Above: unused artwork for The Firemen’s Ball by Saul Bass.

Posters courtesy of Posteritati, Heritage Auctions, KinoArt.net and eBay.

Don't miss our latest features and interviews.

Sign up for the Notebook Weekly Edit newsletter.

Tags

Movie Poster of the WeekMilos FormanColumns
1
Please sign up to add a new comment.

PREVIOUS FEATURES

@mubinotebook
Notebook is a daily, international film publication. Our mission is to guide film lovers searching, lost or adrift in an overwhelming sea of content. We offer text, images, sounds and video as critical maps, passways and illuminations to the worlds of contemporary and classic film. Notebook is a MUBI publication.

Contact

If you're interested in contributing to Notebook, please see our pitching guidelines. For all other inquiries, contact the editorial team.