Above: 1936 alternative one sheet for Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, USA, 1936), designer unknown, and US one sheet for The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, USA, 1980), designer: Saul Bass (1920-1996).
As serendipity would have it, the two most popular posters of the past three months of Movie Poster of the Day were these two black and yellow faces, one a little-known 1930s poster by a journeyman designer at a budget print house, the other a very well known 1980s poster by the most recognizable name in movie poster design. Modern Times and Modern Horror. I’m hoping the love they received (over 500 likes and reblogs for each) were just as much about the items they were promoting: one my article on Leader Press, the other the Poster Boys podcast on Saul Bass by fellow movie poster aficionados (and ace designers) Sam Smith and Brandon Schaefer. Another Poster Boys related poster—Drew Struzan’s The Thing—also made the list. If you haven’t listened to The Poster Boys yet, be sure to very soon.
Hot on the heels of those posters in terms of popularity was the wonderfully arcane new design by the artist known as Midnight Marauder for the new Terrence Malick, fresh out of Berlin, followed closely by a gorgeous Ercole Brini poster of a dress in gold and white that I posted the morning after the Great Dress Color Debate of 2015.
The rest of the top 20, presented below in descending order, come from Italy, the USSR, France, Japan, Poland, Turkey and India, with a few more than usual from the USA. My favorite discovery among these may be the one sheet for The Abominable Dr. Phibes, with its exquisite layout and lettering (so unusual for a horror movie poster) and its phenomenal tagline: “Love means never having to say you’re ugly.”
Above: festival poster for Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick, USA, 2015), designer: Midnight Marauder.
Above: Italian poster for Sabrina (Billy Wilder, USA, 1954), artist: Ercole Brini (1913-1989).
Above: Italian 2-foglio for Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, UK, 1966), designer uncredited.
Above: Soviet export poster for Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR, 1979), artist unknown.
Above: US one sheet for The Abominable Dr. Phibes (Robert Fuest, UK/USA, 1971), designer unknown.
Above: French poster for The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, Australia, 2014), designer: Le Cercle Noir.
Above: French grande for World Without Sun (Jacques-Yves Cousteau, France, 1964), artist: Darigo.
Above: Japanese poster for Temple of the Wild Geese (Yuzo Kawashima, Japan, 1962), designer unknown.
Above: Japanese poster for Nashville (Robert Altman, USA, 1975), designer unknown.
Above: alternative US one sheet for Selma (Ava DuVernay, USA, 2014), designer uncredited.
Above: Polish poster for How Far, How Near (Tadeusz Konwicki, Poland, 1972), artist: Wiktor Gorka (1922-2004).
Above: US one sheet for The Thing (John Carpenter, USA, 1982), artist: Drew Struzan (b. 1947).
Above: 1980 Turkish poster for Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1979), artist: Urgurcan Yuce.
Above: Indian poster for Court (Chaitanya Tamhane, India, 2014), artist: Nishikant Palande, designer: Pigeon & Co.
Above: US one sheet for Fright Night (Tom Holland, USA, 1985), artist: Peter Mueller.
Above: French grande for Dark Star (John Carpenter, USA, 1974), artist: Artist: Lynch-Guillotin.
Above: 1968 Polish poster for I Loved You (Ilya Frez, Hungary, 1967), artist: Witold Chmielewski (b. 1910).
Above: US one sheet for Maps to the Stars (David Cronenberg, Canada/USA, 2014), designer: P+A.
Poster sources are all credited on Movie Poster of the Day; click on the titles above for more information.
You can see an index of all my Movie Poster of the Week posts here, and if you want to see more of Movie Poster of the Day and you’re not on Tumblr you can follow me on Twitter or Facebook and get daily updates there.