Film Posters Of The 70′s
Edited by: Tony Nourmand and Graham Marsh
It’s all change as we ramp everything up several notches. The adult films got as violent and sex driven as they liked. The blockbuster was born. But fist there is time to enjoy a bit of classic pop art with Get Carter!
The it’s enter Jack. Nicholson of course! Chinatown has one of the best loved classic posters of all time, but then there is the photo real images for Five Easy Pieces, The last Detail, and One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest.
Eastwood and Pacino become gritty cops in Dirty Harry and Serpico; so only a gritty distorted image will do for them both. You get a more shocking kind of gritty with Bronson’s Death Wish and Hoffman in Straw Dogs. But can any of it beat Gene Hackman gunning a man down from behind! It’s a hardcore image of an unarmed man taking a bullet in the back from our leading protagonist. The French Connection is no easy watch, and the poster sells it well.
George Lucas hit the scene too – but there is a world of difference between American Graffiti and Star Wars! There was also the birth of the disaster movie with the likes of Earthquake and The Towering Inferno. But nobody does it better than Bond, except maybe Bruce Lee. We get them both!
A shame the Apocalypse Now poster is so small here as it is wonderful. But then so is Star Trek and Superman. But we do get a wonderful Rollerball poster facing them. So even these editors have gone for the underdog which is a nice touch. And speaking of which, indie films get a good look in with a nice section devoted to John Cassavettes films.
Before we hit the sci-fi of Lucas and Ridley Scott’s Alien we get Blaxploitation. Naturally there are the westerns, but also a nice collection of conceptual art for Roma, Solaris and Cabaret.
So what else is there to be found in this book? There is the comedy of Allen and Brooks, the conspiracy theories of Redford/Hoffman and Beatty, sadly none of them found out that it was actually DeNiro taking over the world, despite the best efforts of the musicals and The slasher.
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Steven Hurst