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Above: Hungarian poster for The Sleeping Car Murders. Designer: Sándor Benkő.Last summer I wrote about my discovery of Hungarian movie poster design and featured a number of posters for very well known films from The Wizard of Oz to The Elephant Man. Those posters highlighted the distinctly different graphic approaches taken by Hungarian designers compared to their country-of-origin counterparts. But while delving deeper into the world of Hungarian poster design—mostly via the auction site Bedo—I have come across many even more remarkable designs for films that are less well known. The fifteen posters that I’ve chosen to highlight here were all made in the ’60s and ’70s and there is a distinct pop art sensibility at work: a lot of bold, primary colors and almost cartoonish illustrations, but always in the service of bold, striking graphics. Distinctly upbeat, while perhaps not expressly joyful, they do give...

Bitter Rice

Written by Giuseppe De Santis, Carlo Lizzani, Gianni Puccini

Directed by Giuseppe De Santis

Italy, 1949

The opening credits of Bitter Rice parade an array of Italian film industry luminaries, figures who would help redefine the country’s national cinema, picking up where neorealism left off and setting the stage for the remarkable work that would emerge in the decades to come. Screenwriters Carlo Lizzani and Giuseppe De Santis (who also directed) were two of eight individuals contributing in one way or another to the script, though they were the two who would share an Academy Award nomination for its story. Cinematographer Otello Martelli had nearly 50 films under his belt by the time of Bitter Rice, but in the years that followed he would most memorably man the camera for Federico Fellini’s finest films. And producing the movie was the venerable Dino De Laurentiis, really just at the start of his legendary career.

Forget the proletarian messages, this Italian Neorealist classic is really an exploitation film about ogling brazen, buxom babes in short-shorts, up to their knees in a rice paddy. Hollywood actress Doris Dowling is the nominal star but new discovery Silvana Mangano became the knockout dream of every Italian male suffering from postwar shortages (cough). Giuseppe De Santis delivered the perfect combo -- an art film that pulled in every lonely guy nella cittá. Bitter Rice Blu-ray The Criterion Collection 792 1949 / B&W / 1:33 flat full frame / 109 min. / Riso amaro / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date January 12, 2016 / 29.95 Starring Vittorio Gassman, Doris Dowling, Silvana Mangano, Raf Vallone. Cinematography Otello Martelli Film Editor Gabriele Varriale Original Music Goffredo Petrassi Written by Corrado Alvaro, Giuseppe De Santis, Carlo Lizzani, Franco Monicelli, Carlo Musso, Ivo Perilli, Gianni Puccini Produced by Dino De Laurentiis Directed by Giuseppe De Santis

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Way back in...

Above: 1968 poster for Grand Prix (John Frankenheimer, USA, 1966).

Last weekend I came across a bizarre poster, which you can see below, for Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause: a late 60s Czech design which reimagines James Dean as a long haired, barefoot East European hippie. This got me digging into the work of its author on the estimable and essential Czech movie poster site Terry Posters (named in honor of Terry Gilliam). The artist Eva Galová-Vodrázková was born in 1940 and, after studying at the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague, designed numerous film posters between 1966 and 1972 (Terry Posters has forty-two of them on their site). Her bio says she gave up poster design after “normalisation changes in the venture,” whatever that means, and has since worked as a textile designer. What attracted me to her poster work is a certain devil-may-care quality—evidenced in her Rebel—coupled with a powerful sense of composition.