A few thoughts on 1960s films & posters

The 1960s was a decade rich in challenging and provocative cinema. The slow collapse of the traditional Hollywood studio system, accelerated by the entrenched popularity of television as the preferred visual medium for the masses, meant a number of artistically adventurous and thematically bold films were made throughout the decade alongside more traditional fare.

From the groundbreaking, French New Wave influenced stylings of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), to the violent revisionism of traditional western themes in Sam Peckinpah’s bloody masterpiece The Wild Bunch (1969), the 60s offered up a myriad of ground-breaking, fascinating films.

Often the posters used to promote the movies were as interesting as the films themselves. We’ll focus on a few well known examples here.

Note the brilliant taglines on the posters for Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch, two provocative, notably violent films that challenged audiences and critics alike: “They’re young, they’re in love…and they kill people.” / “Unchanged men in a changing land. Out of step, out of place and desperately out of time.”

The US one-sheets for both Roger Corman’s cult 1967 film The Trip and Richard Rush’s Psych-Out reflect the hippy trippy times of the mid-to-late 60s. The Trip, made, like many of Corman’s movies, for the low budget AIP (American International Pictures) features bold yellow title design with the tagline ‘A Lovely Sort of Death’ (surprisingly sneaking the LSD initials past the censor!). The film itself is an interesting but dated attempt to reflect the drug-fuelled Californian culture of the flower power era. By the way, there’s no such thing as ‘Psychedelic Color’ but perhaps stoner audiences were tempted by the prospect as advertised on the poster!

Note also the early starring roles for Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern. Jack and Bruce really got around in the 60s, both also featuring in the cast on the strikingly psychedelic poster for another AIP cult gem, Psych-Out (also 1967). Susan Strasberg, daughter of Lee Strasberg, guru of the Actors Studio, famous for teaching the Method style of acting, also appears in both films and on both posters, although there’s little evidence of Method style acting in these movies.

Nicholson, Fonda and Dennis Hopper (who also directed) all starred in perhaps the definitive late 1960s film - Easy Rider (1969). Wonderfully described by Leslie Halliwell in one of his indispensable film guides as attracting “freakishly large audiences” the film’s counter culture message, classic rock score underpinned by Steppenwolf’s iconic anthem ‘Born to be Wild’, and the bleakly existential ending, all helped to create and maintain the film’s cult classic status.

It’s also worth noting the stark but brilliant poster artwork for Easy Rider; a bold piece of design, it deliberately leaves a lot of blank space, which reflects the fact that this is a road movie with exploration of the vast open spaces of America clearly implied.

Easy Rider’s unexpected success at the box office opened up a crack in American cinema through which a new generation of ambitious, interesting filmmakers hurtled headlong through; Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdanovich, Terence Malick and others had a lot to thank Fonda, Hopper and Nicholson for. The decade of great American cinema that followed arguably remains unmatched in recent film history. But that’s for another blog…