Marathon Man is one of my all-time favourite thrillers. It was directed by John Schlesinger and written by William Goldman, who also wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, amongst other classics, as well as authoring the classic Hollywood memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade (a must-read for any movie fan). He initially wrote Marathon…
The Mummy / The Mummy’s Shroud
Here’s two Belgian posters for films in Hammer’s Mummy series. The original Mummy is supposed to be as something of a classic but my memory of it is that it was painfully slow and rather dull, notwithstanding it being one of the relatively few Hammer films to star both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing….
Sid & Nancy
This poster is in rather tatty condition, but for once that rather fits with the aesthetic of the film! Oddball director Alex Cox was riffing off the success of his earlier cult hit Repoman and desperately wanted to call his Sid Vicious romance drama Love Kills but the distributors insisted on the rather more commercially…
The Warriors / Streets of Fire
This is a pair of French advance door panel posters (or ‘pantalons’) for two movies from director Walter Hill. Both are highly stylised, nocturnal and urban. Hill made a number of cracking hit thrillers in the 70s-80s, including The Driver and 48 Hours, but both of these movies got lousy reviews and flopped upon release. …
Ciné-Miroir
Here are some ultra-rare items of movie memorabilia sure to pre-date all of us. Memorabilia from the silent movie era is understandably incredibly hard to find and – in the case of posters at least – hugely expensive. So I was very pleased to come across recently a haul of 50 copies of the fascinating…
Cape Fear
Here are two very different posters for both versions of Cape Fear, 30 years apart. The first is a Belgian poster for the Gregory Peck/Robert Mitchum 1962 version. Cape Fear is a taut noir-style thriller about an upright lawyer tormented by a recently paroled psycho he helped put in jail. The French title “les nerfs…
Reality Bites
This is a Japanese “chirashi’ I bought recently as a birthday present for my wife. “Chirashi” are doubled-sided B5 flyers which were printed in limited runs to be handed out in movie theatres in Japan upon a movie’s release. They are relatively cheap to collect and being small are easy to store and display. …
Whispering Smith / The Americano
Here are two very old rare posters for relatively obscure Westerns that I own. These are Spanish posters from 1948 and 1954 respectively for the movies Whispering Smith and The Americano. I think I bought these together from the same vendor, and not sure why as I do not know either of these movies and I…
Blade Runner
I love Blade Runner, but this is one movie that somehow has never seemed to be truly finished! Lots of films change significantly before release during the editing process, but Blade Runner is an example of the relatively recent habit of film-makers going back and tinkering with their movie after release. Steven Spielberg started something…
Bullitt
Before today’s Fast and Furious style CG-enhanced, gravity-defying car mayhem there was the car chase in Bullitt. It is rare that a movie’s reputation rests on one scene – but I think that’s very much the case with Bullitt. The first/only thing people remember about it is the iconic car chase around San Francisco, for…